It's in the nature of Capital that this process happens a lot:
A) company sells a product B) people don't like the price C) people figure out a way to get a lower price (used, waiting for a clearance sale, wholesale, etc.) D) company notices this happening and decides to bamboozle people with it
And, particularly in the last 15 years, this process happens a lot:
A) company creates a product that lets you make a tiny amount of money off of an insignificant action B) an innumerable number of people start creating computer systems to make that action happen at incredible speed
Do you remember how there used to be sites full of coupon codes? Like, discounts at newegg, etc? This hasn't worked in many, many years, for obvious reasons. The internet makes everything happen at lightspeed. You can't just put a coupon out into one little regional market that isn't quite doing the numbers you want. If you put it out anywhere, you will instantly be deluged by 50,000 people who sit on a subreddit called /r/CouponShare 18 hours a day; effectively, it's an instant commitment to sell their entire stock of that item at that price.
But on a whim, I decided to look for newegg discount codes. I found what I always find: A bunch of sites called shit like CouponStar and DiscountFinder that have hundreds and hundreds of them. Usually it's a transparent scam meant to get you to click through some ads, sometimes the codes just pop right up as soon as you click a button, for some reason. In any case, none of the codes ever work. Why would they?
This time, however, I noticed that one of the sites was Tom's Hardware. It's not what it used to be (EVERY brand is a zombie brand) but hey, it's not some randomly-generated domain name, right? They too had a ton of codes. And.... none of them worked.
Then I went back to the google results and noticed that Forbes was there. The LA times. PC Gamer. CNN. All these Known Names had pages. And... they all had curiously similar verbiage, very off-tone for these sites: "57% OFF in March 2023 - PC Gamer." "CNN - $50 OFF Newegg in March 2023."
Then I clicked on the Forbes one, and it all came clear:
This service is operated under license by Upfeat Media Inc. Retailers listed on this page are curated by Upfeat. Forbes editorial staff is not involved. If you make a purchase using a link on this page, Forbes may receive a commission on that sale.
It's sludge as a service. These companies are so dire, so absolutely incapable of making a profit in this world - or so unwilling to turn down any source of profit that seems to "not cost anything," no matter how humiliating - that they're actually ceding a URL on their website to some group of scumbags that fill it up with penny-shaving clickbait.
