- The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare by Fast Company (via somebody on TravelCodex I think). Really interesting read and does a great job articulating some of the points and issues with affiliate links generally.
- Gift of College giftcards available again online, $300 limit instead of $500 this time via reader TravelingPharmacist.
- $250,000 reward offered in near-fatal shooting of Calgary developer by Calgary Herald via VFTW. Take a look at the bullet that went through the American Express black card, wow!
- DEAL DEAD – The $1,000 VGC from Giftcardmall by Miles Per Day. $1,000 delivered for $0.49 and no fees, this is what true love looks like.
How funny that after reading that link to the Casper lawsuit, I return here to find a big Casper ad in the middle of the page.
Thanks for posting the mattress story. My takeaway from this is that both sides used really shady methods for profit, and it’s the consumers that were lied to. We all know about the greed of the credit card affiliate bloggers, but I never thought about mattresses too. I guess this is why I rely mostly on Amazon customer reviews mosly.
Also be careful with the Amazon customer reviews. If you look carefully, some products got good reviews within a very short span of time, and many were not “Verified Purchase”.
Interesting Mattress story. Basically it means “Yes, please! Review our product and give your honest feedback. Unless your feedback is negative, in which case prepare for a lawsuit”.
There needs to be some kind of legal regulation, in that, if someone reviews your product then you hereby waive any right to file a lawsuit against the reviewer based on anything in which they have said in the review. Until then, reviewers will review based on which ones give them the most money and such.
What were the issues you identified about affiliate links?
This goes into some detail: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/were-removing-all-credit-card-affiliate-links-heres-why/
Why post a link to an article about a mid-2016 glitch for cheap VGCs? Might as well post about the Good Ol’ Days when people could get coins from the mint or the pudding cup man.
The aim of posting dead deals is to try and learn from each deal. Changing the string at the end of a url is something I already do and I’ve found a lot of extra deals because of it. Savvy readers would take the same lesson from that post.
Hi Doc, will you please give a training on “changing the string at the end of a url” to discover “a lot of extra deals”? 😉 😉
I usually post anything interesting I find on the site =)
So the takeaway is don’t trust online mattress reviews, especially as they relate to Casper?
don’t trust any affiliate links.
i.e credit cards, etc.
I wouldn’t apply that logic just to mattress reviews.
Wait, so Casper sued out of oblivion any negative reviews of its mattresses? How is this not a bigger story?
That wasn’t my takeaway. It seems that Sleepopolis initially praised Casper then steered readers to other companies that paid Sleepopolis more money. But Casper was also trying to do the same thing. It’s convoluted as all hell, and I’m sure there is a lot of missing information.
In any case I’ve found http://www.sleeplikethedead.com to be as impartial as it gets for mattress reviews. And at least they are all under pressure to have generous return/refund policies so you can shop around and try a few out.