Doozly
Every list of Amazon affiliate website examples names the same handful of sites — Wirecutter, OutdoorGearLab, Epic Gardening — and describes them with adjectives. Almost none of them attach a number you can check, and the numbers that do circulate are often wrong. This list has seventeen sites, and every figure on it says where it came from: an acquisition filing, a company announcement, the owner saying it on the record, or a named traffic estimate.
The numbers lead somewhere uncomfortable, which is why other lists leave them out. The most famous examples were built under commission rates that no longer exist, several of the best-known ones are quietly moving away from Amazon, and two independent sites have documented how they nearly disappeared from Google. One thing all seventeen have in common is worth saying first, because it is the commonest misunderstanding about the model — none of them is paid by Amazon for the reviews themselves.
The examples at a glance
| Site | How it earns | The documented number |
|---|---|---|
| PCPartPicker | Tool | ≈9m visits a month (Semrush estimate, August 2026) |
| CamelCamelCamel | Tool | No public figures |
| Wirecutter | Testing | Bought by The New York Times for $25.0m in October 2016 |
| OutdoorGearLab | Testing | ≈2.8m visits a month (Semrush estimate, August 2026) |
| RTINGS.com | Testing | 4,952 products bought and tested, by its own count |
| HouseFresh | Testing | Google visitors fell from 4,000 a day to 200 after October 2023 |
| BestReviews | Publisher desk | Sold to Nexstar for $160m, agreed December 2020 |
| The Strategist | Publisher desk | Around $14m in 2018, per its then head of e-commerce |
| BuzzFeed Shopping | Publisher desk | $55.5m affiliate commerce revenue in 2025, mostly from Amazon |
| The Spruce | Publisher desk | No separate figures published |
| Brad’s Deals | Deals feed | No public figures |
| This Is Why I’m Broke | Novelty feed | ≈780k visits a month (Semrush estimate, August 2026) |
| 10Beasts | Niche site | Eight pages, sold for $570,000 at the end of 2017 |
| Dog Food Advisor | Niche site | Sold to Wag! for $9m in cash, January 2023 |
| Swim University | Niche site | Over $600,000 a year by 2022, after ten years |
| Home Grounds | Niche site | No public figures |
| Epic Gardening | Started on Amazon, left | Lost $35k a month overnight in the 2020 rate cut |
On the numbers. Sale prices come from filings and announcements; income figures come from the operators themselves and are not audited. Traffic figures are third-party estimates — modelled, not measured — and are given with their source and month so you can check them again. Where nothing credible is public, this page says so rather than inventing a range. Amazon links were checked on the live sites in September 2026; where a site blocked the check, the text says that too.
Tools people come back to
The two sites in this group are not content sites at all, and that is the whole lesson.
PCPartPicker is a compatibility checker for people building a computer. You pick a processor, it tells you which boards, memory and cases fit, and it lists prices across retailers — Amazon among them. Around nine million visits a month by Semrush’s estimate for August 2026, and almost none of it comes from articles. The affiliate link is a by-product of a tool nobody else was offering, and people use it every time they build, not once.
CamelCamelCamel tracks Amazon prices and emails you when one drops. Its about page carries the Amazon Associate disclosure, which means the site earns on exactly the purchase it was built to time. There is no review, no ranking, no opinion — just a chart and a button. No revenue figures have ever been published.
Both built something a competitor cannot copy by rewriting product listings. That is the thread running through almost every example here that has lasted.
Testing labs, large and small
Wirecutter is the example on every list, and the figure attached to it on most of them is wrong. The New York Times bought it in October 2016; press reports put the price at more than $30m including retention payments, and the Times’ own annual report says $25.0m including a non-compete payment. The “$150m” that gets repeated alongside it is not Wirecutter’s revenue. Its founder said the site drove $150m in e-commerce transactions in 2015 — sales at retailers, of which Wirecutter earned a commission. That is the difference between a shop’s turnover and the tip you get for sending customers there.
The lesson people take from Wirecutter is “test products properly”. That is true and it is not the useful part. The useful part is that it stopped being an affiliate site: it sits behind a national newspaper’s brand and subscription, and by late 2025 Forbes was describing its path to $1bn in driven commerce. It teaches you what a decade of compounding authority looks like. It does not teach you how to start.
OutdoorGearLab made the cost of entry physical. Its reviewers buy the equipment — “no freebies from manufacturers”, in its own words — take it into the field and break some of it. Around 2.8m visits a month (Semrush, August 2026). The part other lists miss is that the method now runs three sites: the same owner operates BabyGearLab and TechGearLab on the same model, each with its own Amazon tag. A testing method is a thing you can copy across niches; an article is not.
RTINGS.com is one of the best-known independent testing labs in consumer electronics — 4,952 products bought and tested at the time of writing. It is on this list for what it said in March 2026, when it rebuilt itself around paid membership: “RTINGS.com has historically relied heavily on organic search traffic from Google and affiliate links. That model is becoming less reliable.” It still carries affiliate links. It no longer wants to depend on them.
HouseFresh is the small version of the same idea: an independent team testing air purifiers, founded at the end of 2020, with Amazon’s roughly 3 % commission as — its own words — “our only source of revenue”. It is also the clearest documented case of what happened to independent review sites after 2023, which is further down.
Commerce desks inside big publishers
This is where the largest documented numbers are, and it is the part of the market independent sites compete with for every “best X” search.
BestReviews publishes broad buying guides and earns, in its buyer’s words, “through a revenue share model with its retail partners against all sales generated”. Nexstar agreed to buy it for $160m in December 2020, citing nine million monthly visitors; its annual report puts the cash paid at $169.9m. A review site, sold to a television company, for nine figures.
The Strategist, New York Magazine’s shopping section, sells taste rather than testing: what an expert or a well-known person actually owns. According to reporting in the Columbia Journalism Review, its then head of e-commerce announced it had netted around $14m in 2018, and contributors put it at two million dollars a month or more by 2023.
BuzzFeed Shopping is the only example here whose Amazon dependence is written down in a regulatory filing. BuzzFeed’s annual report for 2025: affiliate commerce revenue of $55.5m, “approximately 28% of our revenue was derived from Amazon”, and Amazon “currently accounts for the vast majority of our affiliate commerce revenue”. It gives each writer a separate Associates tag, so it knows which person’s posts earn. The filing lists that concentration as a risk. It is the same risk a one-person site carries, stated by people obliged to state it.
The Spruce, a home and garden brand owned by People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), is here for a smaller reason: look at the source of one of its buying guides and you find an ordinary Amazon Associates tag, the same mechanism a solo blogger uses. The scale is different. The plumbing is not.
Deals and novelty feeds
Brad’s Deals is a curated deals feed: editors pick the discounts worth having, and the links on its front page carry an Amazon tag. The editorial filter is the product — anyone can scrape a list of price drops, and a list of all of them is useless.
This Is Why I’m Broke is a feed of odd products, around 780k visits a month (Semrush, August 2026), and its traffic model is sharing rather than search. It shows something about Amazon’s commission that most people miss: you are paid on the whole basket, not the product you linked. Somebody who clicks on a novelty lamp and then buys a kettle earns the site commission on the kettle. A site that gets people onto Amazon in a buying mood is worth more than its linked products suggest.
Small niche sites, and what they sold for
10Beasts is the example worth the most attention precisely because it is unglamorous. Luqman Khan built it as an eight-page affiliate site in the gadget niche; it earned “mostly Amazon”, broke $80,000 in December 2016, and at the end of 2017 he sold it through the broker Empire Flippers. Asked the final price, he said: “It was $570,000.” (The $598,262 quoted on many pages, including an earlier version of this one, does not come from him.) Semrush now estimates the site at around six thousand visits a month — it peaked, it sold, and it faded.
For a more ordinary price point, Empire Flippers published the full story of a home-fixtures review site that earned $5,141.78 from Amazon in August 2015 and sold the following year for $145,000. Affiliate sites sell at a multiple of monthly profit, which is why the exit rather than the income is often the real payday — and why building to sell is a different plan from building to earn.
Dog Food Advisor is a dog-food rating site. In January 2023 the pet-services company Wag! bought it for $9m in cash. The buyer was not an investor looking for affiliate income but a company that wanted the audience. Whether its links still point at Amazon under the new owner we could not check; the site blocks automated requests.
Swim University explains pool and hot-tub care. Matt Giovanisci started it in 2006, and by 2022 it made over $600,000 a year — “but it took 10 years”. Its how-to pages still carry Amazon links. How its revenue is split changed completely, which is the next section.
Home Grounds, a coffee site, is the example closest to what most readers of this page are building: buying guides, product boxes from a WordPress plugin, Amazon alongside direct programmes from coffee brands, and Amazon links routed through Geniuslink so a reader abroad lands in their own country’s store. No figures are public. It is here because its setup is the one worth studying, not its income.
The pattern in the best examples: they are leaving
Put the owners’ own statements side by side and a pattern appears that no list of examples mentions. The sites that did best with Amazon are the ones working hardest to need it less.
- Epic Gardening is on nearly every list as an Amazon affiliate site. Its founder Kevin Espiritu said Amazon cut gardening “from eight to 4% and I lost 35 K a month immediately”. The business went from half a million in revenue in 2019 to $2.8m in 2020 by selling its own products, which by 2023 were over 90 % of it. The blog posts we sampled in September 2026 link to its own shop, not to Amazon.
- Swim University used to make 70 % of its revenue from Amazon and 30 % from its own digital products. After the cuts that “literally flipped”, in Giovanisci’s words — and he makes more now.
- RTINGS.com moved to paid membership in 2026 and wrote that affiliate revenue “naturally creates incentives to recommend higher-priced products or those with higher commissions”.
- BuzzFeed is still heavily dependent on Amazon, and lists exactly that as a risk to its investors.
None of this says Amazon links stop being worth having. Every one of these sites still uses them, or started with them. It says that the owners who knew the numbers best treated Amazon as the first income, not the last one.
The part every list leaves out
On 21 April 2020 Amazon cut Associates commission rates across most categories, in some cases by more than half:
Read that against the timeline. 10Beasts earned its $80,000 month in December 2016 and sold a year later. Wirecutter was sold in 2016. The $145,000 fixtures site sold in 2016. The headline exits on this page, and on every other list of examples, happened in a commission environment that ended in April 2020. Epic Gardening’s $35,000-a-month loss is what that change looked like from the inside.
This does not mean the model is dead. It means that a site with identical traffic and identical conversion earns a fraction of what these examples earned, and that any plan built by copying them needs to survive that arithmetic. Nobody writing “21 inspiring examples” mentions it, because it is not inspiring.
Every example on every list was built before 2023
This is the second thing these lists leave out, and it matters more than the commission cuts. The sites above earned their positions in a search landscape that no longer exists. Between September 2023 and 2024 Google reshaped exactly this category, and the reshaping was not subtle.
Two of the independent sites here documented what it did to them. HouseFresh wrote that “since October 2023, we’ve gone from welcoming 4,000 people from Google Search each day to just receiving 200” — a site that bought and tested every purifier it reviewed, losing 95 % of its search visitors. Retro Dodo, a retro-gaming site that earned from Amazon alongside display ads, reported in April 2024 that the same updates had cut its organic traffic and revenue by 85 % and that it was losing money. HouseFresh’s co-founder said on social media in October 2025 that its traffic had come back; Retro Dodo’s owner wrote that he would have to cut staff.
Independent analyses of review sites hit by the Helpful Content Update put average losses at more than half their traffic, and one study that tracked over four hundred badly hit sites found that fewer than a quarter had recovered meaningfully a year later. Those figures come from SEO studies rather than from Google, so treat them as the shape of the thing rather than as precise measurements — but the two first-hand accounts above match the shape. Then in March 2024 the site reputation abuse policy closed the other door: affiliate sections published on somebody else’s high-authority domain became spam by definition.
| What worked when these sites were built | What the same move meets now |
|---|---|
| A hundred keyword-shaped review pages, written from spec sheets | The exact pattern the Helpful Content Update targeted |
| Ranking without ever touching the product | Google explicitly weighting first-hand experience — and HouseFresh shows even that is no guarantee |
| Renting authority from a big publisher’s domain | Classified as site reputation abuse since March 2024 |
| Commission rates roughly double today’s in several categories | 3 % to 4 % in most of the categories people write about |
| A search result page that was ten blue links | An answer at the top that resolves the question without a click — RTINGS’ stated reason for changing course |
This is not an argument that it cannot be done. It is an argument against reverse-engineering a site that was built for different conditions. The examples are still worth studying for the parts that were never about search: PCPartPicker’s tool, OutdoorGearLab’s testing, Wirecutter’s willingness to name one winner. Those aged well precisely because they were not keyword strategies.
What has not aged well is the part every list actually teaches: pick a niche, publish fifty reviews, wait. Checked September 26, 2026.
What you can copy, and what you cannot
Strip the seventeen sites down and the transferable part is short.
- Copyable: answering one buying decision completely. 10Beasts did it eight times and it was enough — then.
- Copyable: owning something a rewrite cannot reproduce — a tool, a test bench, a measurement, a curated eye. Something that costs you real effort is the only durable moat.
- Copyable: a second income from the start. Epic Gardening and Swim University both added their own products; it is what saved them when the rates fell.
- Copyable: earning from readers you already have. More on this below, because it is the cheapest win available and almost everyone leaves it on the table.
- Not copyable: Wirecutter’s institutional authority, or BuzzFeed’s audience. You cannot start with a newspaper.
- Not copyable: the 2016 commission rates. Plan with today’s.
That fourth point deserves its own paragraph, because it is the one thing on the list that costs nothing and pays immediately. Sites at this scale have international audiences by default — a gear review ranks the same in Toronto, Munich and Mumbai. Home Grounds routes its Amazon links by country. An Amazon Associates tag is valid in one country only. A reader in Germany who clicks a link tagged for amazon.com lands on the American store, sees the shipping cost, and leaves. The sale often still happens, on their own Amazon, with no tag attached and nothing in your reports.
If you have not looked, look: paste your country report into the audience check and it will tell you what share of your readers sits outside your home marketplace, and which programmes are worth joining first. Then decide deliberately what should happen to them. The two routes are Amazon’s own OneLink, which we compare here in full, or holding a tag per marketplace yourself. Either beats the default, which is earning nothing from them. If the whole idea of one tag per country is new, the piece on your preferred Associates Store ID explains where those tags come from.
Common questions
What is the most successful Amazon affiliate website?
By documented sale price, BestReviews, which Nexstar agreed to buy for $160m in December 2020. By disclosed affiliate revenue, BuzzFeed: $55.5m of affiliate commerce revenue in 2025, the vast majority from Amazon. Wirecutter is larger than both in influence, but its own affiliate revenue has never been published; the often-quoted $150m was the value of sales it drove in 2015, not what it earned.
How many articles does an Amazon affiliate site need?
Fewer than most people assume, but the famous proof is old. 10Beasts sold for $570,000 at the end of 2017 with eight pages, each fully answering one buying question in a narrow niche. That was before the 2020 commission cuts and the 2023 Google updates; the principle of depth over volume survived both, the eight-page shortcut did not.
How much do Amazon affiliate websites sell for?
Brokered sites sell at a multiple of monthly profit, so the price follows earnings rather than traffic. Documented examples range from $145,000 for a home-fixtures site earning about $5,100 a month from Amazon, through $570,000 for 10Beasts and $9m in cash for Dog Food Advisor, to $160m for BestReviews.
Are these examples still realistic today?
The model works; the arithmetic changed. Amazon cut Associates commission rates across most categories on 21 April 2020, in some cases by more than half, and the famous exits all happened before that. Epic Gardening’s founder lost $35,000 a month in a single day when gardening went from 8 % to 4 %.
Do Amazon affiliate sites have to be product reviews?
No. PCPartPicker is a compatibility tool, CamelCamelCamel is a price tracker, Brad’s Deals is a curated deals feed and This Is Why I’m Broke is a novelty feed driven by social sharing rather than search. All of them earn from Amazon links without publishing conventional reviews.
Did Google’s updates change what works for affiliate sites?
Substantially. HouseFresh, an independent air-purifier testing site, went from 4,000 Google visitors a day to 200 after October 2023, and Retro Dodo reported an 85 % fall in traffic and revenue. Since March 2024 the site reputation abuse policy also treats affiliate sections hosted on somebody else’s authoritative domain as spam. Every site on every examples list was built before either change.
Why are successful affiliate sites moving away from Amazon?
Because the owners saw what one rate change or one algorithm update could do. Epic Gardening now earns over 90 % from its own products, Swim University flipped from 70 % Amazon to 70 % its own digital products, and RTINGS.com moved to paid membership in 2026, saying affiliate income alone had become less reliable. All of them still use Amazon links; none of them wants to depend on them.
Where can I see the traffic of these sites myself?
Third-party estimators such as Semrush and Similarweb publish figures for any domain. Treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement — they are modelled, not measured, and two tools can disagree by a factor of two on the same site.
If you take one thing from these examples, make it the unglamorous one. None of these sites won by publishing more. They won by owning something — a tool, a test bench, a curated eye, eight genuinely complete answers — and the ones still standing added a second income before they needed it.
