Inside Inflatable Boarder – How We Make Money

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If you are anything like me, making a purchase is usually a three step process: identify the need, research the products, and make the decision. Step one is pretty straight forward. Steps two and three can be nerve wracking.

These days it can be difficult to sift through and identify reliable sources of information from the marketing chaff. The product review industry is big, and, like any other industry, has a range of source reliability and trustworthiness.

I’m writing this post not to tell you that Inflatable Boarder is a trustworthy source of information, but so you can see how we operate and why we believe we are a reliable and trustworthy source for product reviews and education for paddle sports.

In a perfect world we would have access to high-quality and impartial review content that is completely free of money. I would love to be independently wealthy enough to be able to offer that service for you. Unfortunately, Uncle Bezos and Uncle Gates probably don’t have me in their wills (but if you are reading this, I’m totally OK with you adding me).

In order to bring you in-depth and independent content here on Inflatable Boarder we do have to be able to pay for overhead expenses, keep up with certifications and industry events, feed our families, and save for a rainy day.

This is the same for every review website and content producer. But how we go about it is not always the same.

How Does the Review Industry Make Money?

There are four avenues for a reviewer to monetize their content.

The first is traditional advertising. This is where a content producer sells space on their website, in their videos, and other media for advertisements. Brands often work with intermediaries (like Google Ad Space or Meta Ads) to place an ad, designed by the brand, onto various outlets. The website or outlet where you experience the ad generally has little input on specific advertising content beyond broad categories when using these services. These intermediaries specialize in personalized advertising content for the viewer, not necessarily related to the content of the website.

Some media channels opt to sell ad space directly to brands for more specificity. Currently, Inflatable Boarder sells ad space directly in order to keep it related to stand up paddle boarding.

Sponsored / Promotional content is targeted to a specific media outlet. Typically sponsorship deals offer payment for the use of a brand’s products, and sponsored content is more casually implemented. For example, an athlete wearing a certain brand’s clothing or using equipment provided for them to use exclusively in their own social media feed. In sponsorship deals, the brands pay the media outlet or individual for exclusive use of their products.

Promotional content is more directed and dictated. Here the media outlet is purposely calling out their use of the product at the request of the brand. This is a common type of income for social media “influencers,” and most social media channels do require promotional and sponsored content to be identified. Again, the brand is paying the media outlet for the creation of the specified promotional content.

Promotional and Sponsored content can be a little confusing as both words are also used to describe things like advertised search results, sponsored video series on YouTube, and paid promotions through influencers depending on where you see the content.

The third avenue is through Pay-to-Play income models. This is less common now than it used to be, but is still around. It’s a classic “magazine” style of income where a media outlet charges a fixed amount up front to produce content about the brand. Like Promotional content, Pay-to-Play content is generally going to show products in their absolute best light and minimize any drawbacks or problems. After all, if a brand pays a lot of money upfront to an outlet to produce a review of their product, and it reviews poorly, the brand is less-likely to pay that outlet to review their next product.

Sometimes pay-to-play content is identified as “sponsored” or “promotional” but it varies by outlet. When pay-to-play content is hosted on a media outlet’s own website, it may not be identified at all.

The fourth income model is one of the most common in the review industry and content creators – Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate marketing is a two step process. First, the brand and media outlet work together to (sometimes) supply products and come up with a revenue sharing model as a percentage of sales attributed to the affiliate. Then the media outlet will have either a specific code or will use tracking cookies so the brand can identify when a customer has utilized that resource to make a purchase decision. After the sale is complete, the brand pays out a small percentage of the sale to the media outlet.

How Does Inflatable Boarder Make Money?

Inflatable Boarder generates income primarily through Affiliate Marketing with some supplemental Traditional Advertising (like the “side bar” advertisement that’s at the top right of this page).

We work with many different brands and the majority of them (though not all) pay us a small percentage for affiliated sales. When you click one of our “Check Price” buttons and go to the brand webpage, you’ll see that the URL is quite long with a bunch of “gobbledy-gook” at the end. That gobbledy-gook is the affiliation information that tells the brand you are visiting from Inflatable Boarder.

We have not taken any sponsorship or promotional content deals, and we have not participated in any pay-to-play schemes. Inflatable Boarder will always identify any such content whether it be on social media platforms or our own website. Why? Because we value integrity and transparency and believe these values will help promote and grow the sport of stand up paddle boarding far more than a marginal increase in potential profit from hiding such content.

Money and Trust

It’s a natural instinct to associate making money with lower trust. After all, there’s an incentive for a marketer to get you to buy something. But, that doesn’t mean a source is untrustworthy just because it generates revenue.

That’s where the difference in how we choose to make money comes into play.

Traditional advertising is fairly neutral. While advertisers can make some decisions on where and when to place ads, they aren’t typically dictating exactly where the ad appears, nor are they able to dictate the content around which it appears. Income from traditional advertising is mostly tied to traffic volume and click-through-rates. The more people visit a website, the more likely someone will click the ad, and the more revenue it generates.

Affiliate marketing income is tied directly to sales. Now, this can lead to shady practices to boost sales (more on that in the next section). However, it also provides reviewers like us with independence from the brand while still providing first-hand experience with the products.

First, as an affiliate marketing website we get to choose which brands we work with. While we’ve certainly been surprised by brands in the past (both over- and under-performing our expectations), our experience as professionals in the industry gives us the ability to identify red flags and green flags with brands before we begin working with them. This lets us minimize our risk of wasted time and effort with products we know we won’t recommend in the end.

Second, when a brand sends us a product, they do so at their own risk. There’s no guarantee of a favorable review. It’s up to the product to impress us, not us to glorify a product.

We’re able to honestly compare products with standardized testing and provide our real opinions on them. Because we work with multiple brands and multiple products, if a single board doesn’t do well in testing, we don’t worry about that impacting our bottom line. We know that we can recommend other products to readers that will suit their needs (and yes we do offer personalized recommendations if you email us!).

When a product doesn’t work well we work with the brands and offer reasons why and suggestions on improvement. Why do we do this? Because we are invested in helping promote the sport of stand up paddle boarding. And not just financially; we were paddlers first and got into this industry because of that passion.

How to Identify Reviewer Reliability

I tell folks that affiliate marketers come in two basic varieties.

The first is those that use a shotgun approach of low-trust, low-quality, low-effort methods that are designed to simply get as many clicks as possible to make money based on volume. The good news is, these types of schemes are easy to spot.

They are most common on websites/channels that review everything under the sun. The reviews themselves are superficial, and often are written completely by reading the specifications of a product rather than by someone who has used the product.

They are also identifiable by a lack of original images (using only those from the brand’s product page/social media), use of generic language, and you’ll often feel like you learned nothing new after reading it or it didn’t help you make a decision. Often, they are written by people (or AI) that have no experience or qualifications within that industry.

Nowadays, some of these reviews are written using generative AI to simply pump out dozens of pages of content each day – focusing more on SEO and exploiting “the algorithm” than actual content quality.

The other type of affiliate marketer is the niche reviewer providing high-trust, high-quality, and high-effort content that is designed to provide you with real information about the product from someone who has actually used it, tested it, and is knowledgeable about the specific industry.

These reviews are also easy to identify. The websites and channels will be devoted to a single topic (or maybe a couple of related topics like paddle boarding and kayaking), the reviews will be longer with details of the product not found on the brand’s product page, they will have original imagery of the product, and will have direct affiliate relationships with brands, and have a consistent writing staff of experts in the field. They’ll also be communicative and upfront with readers about any relationships with brands or products.

Hey! That sounds a lot like Inflatable Boarder!

We pride ourselves on offering data-driven reviews with actual experience, actual comparison, and honest evaluations. It takes us longer to produce content as we focus on quality over quantity. We take time away from reviews to actually go paddle and be active members in the paddling community. We work to promote paddle sports through education, advocacy, and pushing brands to innovate.

Final Thoughts

I know this has been a dense (and probably boring) article. If you read through the whole thing, thank you. If you skipped to this conclusion, no hard feelings.

Before I began writing for Inflatable Boarder, I had some reservations. One of my first jobs was as a photojournalist for a small newspaper. I loved it. That ethic of journalistic integrity has stayed with me through the years and created my chief concern here. I was absolutely not willing to sacrifice that integrity to write puff pieces for the highest bidder.

I’m glad to say that the owners of Inflatable Boarder 100% agreed with me.

One of the really cool things about Inflatable Boarder is that it is part of a small company that does similar work in other industries (and yes, also owns SUPBoardGuide.com). Because of this structure, as the head writer for Inflatable Boarder, I am a salaried employee and have an extra layer of insulation from any potential sales influence. I honestly could not tell you how much money this website generates in a year, nor what the top earning product is. And I love that. It allows me to be impartial with my reviews and focus on the performance and feel of the products, rather than their commission rate.

I’m so excited to be able to share my experience, knowledge and passion for paddle sports with you all, and the revenue from affiliate marketing and advertising allows me to do so regularly while still staying current and participating in the sport.

If you have any questions about Inflatable Boarder, send us an email using the contact form at the bottom of the site.

– Mike and the Inflatable Boarder team

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