The war to sell you a mattress

The business models for pricing aggregators and reviews sites are completely absent. Even Consumer Reports struggles to meet the costs of testing and staffing. The BBB is a mess. The &quot;Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval&quot; hasn&#x27;t meant anything for decades.<p>It&#x27;s a sad state of affairs: We all want unbiased reviews, but we won&#x27;t pay for them. We all want to know the spread of prices so we can balance service&#x2F;trust with cheap, but price aggregators are all either blocked out of existence or become affiliate listings.<p>While so many things have come true, there are still a few internet dreams like free-flow price summaries and wisdom-of-the-honest-crowd which are sadly still just beyond our grasp.

Amazing to see people stumbling upon millions. Most techies are trying to come up with clever technical solutions to try and build an online business. Whilst elsewhere there are people making millions from reviewing mattresses. Or whatever the next accidental hot market will be.

The whole mattress industry is a scam. Actual manufacturing cost is $75-$300. Mattresses are even cheaper on Alibaba. Vacuum-packing memory foam shrinks mattresses for shipping, and now they can be imported easily.<p>If you really want to annoy the US mattress industry, set up a review site and review sub-$100 mattresses off Alibaba.<p>(Personally, I have an air bed which cost about $200.)

The irony here being, after I read this article, I&#x27;m now seeing ads for mattresses all over the web due to the embedded ads in the article. Marketing and advertising feels more like a virus than anything these days.

I&#x27;ve found Ikea to be a great place to buy a mattress. No shady sales tactics or aggressive salesmen, several models you can physically try out in the store, and good quality&#x2F;value.

There is similar situation in the diamond engagement ring market, of all places! NiceIce, Beyond4Cs, Yourdiamondteacher, ProsumerDiamonds -- all affiliate marketing blogs that drive a lot of sales. No lawsuit yet to reveal the inner workings, but undoubtedly there is the same shadiness.

The mattress industry is a total scam. Nest Bedding&#x27;s CEO, the one that was quoted in the article, even goes so far as to threaten people who post negative reviews on Yelp. I left a one-star review on their website, but it doesn&#x27;t even appear in their product ratings. The ratings distribution on Nest&#x27;s website is statistically impossible!<p>Other companies aren&#x27;t any better. Casper cheapened the materials used in their mattress, but is still riding on positive reviews for the original model which used latex (more expensive) as a top layer.

Why is everything a &quot;war&quot; in the American media? war on obesity, war on diabetes, war on this, war on that...?<p>It is just businesses competing to sell products - maybe a little too interested in suing, but business nevertheless.

Now this made me thinking of other online review sites. Are they all like that?<p>I couldn&#x27;t give an honest review, if I get more money from B than A. So if they state otherwise, I call it fraud And I know that&#x27;s what people call marketing in general and there might be some truth in it - but that&#x27;s why you go to these review site to get a neutral view.<p>So normally the customer should pay the reviewer, he is doing work for him, because when the company pays the reviewer ...

If you want to make a lot of money - place yourself between the consumers and the producers.

I&#x27;m shocked that no one has posted <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themattressunderground.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themattressunderground.com&#x2F;</a> yet. It is totally worth a look. The amount of technical detail is right up HN&#x27;s alley.<p>Full disclosure: I paid nothing to the site, but used it to find a local mattress shop (and manufacturer) and purchased a mid-range queen mattress at a good price. Apparently the shop owner had received quite a few referrals from them, but he never paid them or received any payment from them.

How do you make the switch to foam mattresses? They just feel so strange and different compared to regular mattresses?

The whole online mattress industry has a bit of a stink to it. Here in Australia, I have been stalked for months by a particular brand of online mattress, Koala(?), on my Facebook feed, which I ignored, but on the past few weeks, I see the SAME ads on FB with the SAME girl in them etc., sold as a completely new brand.<p>I assume the original company either went bankrupt or received a C&amp;D from somewhere and had to change their name. But this does nothing at all to increase my confidence in these online sellers. Welcome to the Cialis of 2017...

What does YC think of companies that make affiliate revenue? Is it a positive or a negative in the VC world?

This just proves it: the worst thing a company can do is to underestimate the stupidity of its customers.

This article kind of makes Casper sound like the Uber of mattress companies.

Many podcasters are in the same boat, though they try to mask it. I only listen to probably 3 podcasts, but I hear the same sponsor reads on a daily basis. Casper, Fracture, Betterment, Warby-Parker, etc. The reads given by these sponsors are only guidelines, the better podcasters personalize them to make them sound like real endorsements not just ad reads.

This reminds me a lot of the web hosting industry, which also has a huge issue with questionable review sites set up for affiliate payments and hosting companies owning supposedly neutral sites about the industry.<p>There are at least a few active forums you can ask about good hosting companies on (which is something the mattress buying process seems to lack), but then you have to deal with astroturfing and companies &#x27;hinting&#x27; that you should use their service in every post.<p>Either way, I think these industries (and many others) are in this situation because the internet has just made good, high quality journalism unprofitable. Along with clickbait and actual lies, it seems affiliate commissions are where the money is in writing nowadays, meaning there&#x27;s a huge incentive to write pandering crap and an equally large disincentive to care about being a truly helpful source for this information.

This article is way too long.

Sad thing is even with full disclosures there are vast numbers of people who will not read the disclosure. Some sites do a bang up job of making the disclosures so unnoticeable that they never lose a referral.

I really knew very little about the whole affiliate marketing economy before reading this. My primary reaction after reading it is just to SMH at the fundamentally greedy acquisitive dishonesty of the whole mess. I realize it&#x27;s nothing new, but still.

Really interesting article but he really zoomed past the &quot;I got a free mattress&quot; part

Fascinating read. Who would&#x27;ve thought to roll a massage and ship it? I grew up and still sleep on spring mattresses. No rolling here.

I got a $5000 queen sized latex mattress for $300 because I bought from the clearance section at [popular mattress store chain].

&gt; Much of this traffic went to Amazon (when Derek lacked a direct affiliate relationship, he sent traffic to a brand’s page on Amazon, with whom he did).<p>Something is not not right here. Was Derek banned from the Amazon affiliates program? How else does he &quot;lack a direct affiliate relationship&quot; ? I made a viral cat videos site for kicks and was approved by amazon affiliates to link to cat product reviews... so why wouldn&#x27;t someone like this guy be able to get a direct amazon.com affiliate account?

This was fascinating.

Article sounds like infotainment to me, made to advertise mattress advertising websites. After reading that article you certainly going to remember their name.<p>Everything in the article is probably true, however.