The Guardian to Launch New Review Product Focusing on Sustainability

The Guardian is preparing to launch a product recommendation vertical on its website this summer. Its core point of differentiation will be its focus on sustainability, according to a person familiar with the project.

A job listing associated with the new, unnamed venture describes it as a means to guide Guardian readers toward sustainable options and help them use their products better and for longer.

A representative for The Guardian confirmed the new venture.

“This summer, The Guardian is launching a trusted recommendations section on our website, helping our readers to make more informed, more sustainable consumer choices,” said the spokesperson. “For our readers, this will be a home for The Guardian’s consumer journalism, and our reviews and features will always be editorially independent. We are initially launching in the U.K., with other territories to follow.”

The media outlet‘s new product will place The Guardian more prominently in the product review and recommendation space, which could expand the revenue it generates from affiliate links. Similar ventures, such as The New York Times’ Wirecutter and The Wall Street Journal’s Buy Side, enable publishers to leverage the trust they have with their audience into a new line of business.

Differentiation through sustainability

The new vertical’s focus on sustainability could help it navigate two of the core challenges that newcomers to the affiliate space face: differentiation and relevance.

During the pandemic, as more shopping moved online, publishers flooded the space in hopes of generating affiliate revenue. The resulting glut saturated the ecosystem, making it challenging for publishers to differentiate their review offerings from competitors.

In response, outlets have worked to emphasize what distinguishes their product review offerings from their competition. Some have led with the rigor of their testing, while others have pointed to their history in the space or served a highly specific niche.

The Guardian, in focusing on sustainable products, will look to cast that point of view as what distinguishes it from its competitive set. The publisher has long cultivated a reputation as an environmentally minded outlet. 

It is one of the only premium news outlets to refuse to work with oil and gas advertisers, and it has ambitious internal goals for reducing its own carbon footprint, which it tracks and publishes in its earnings reports.

As a result, it will have a “right to win” in the space, as affiliate experts say. However, it will be far from the only publisher using sustainability as a means of differentiation.

The Cool Down, a publisher launched by Bleacher Report cofounder Dave Finocchio, was specifically created to cover climate change and showcase products and services that consumers can use to minimize their carbon footprints. 

Similarly, product review sites regularly compile lists of sustainable options. Items that last longer are often both good for the environment and attractive to value-minded consumers, creating a natural overlap.

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Diversifying revenue

The review arm will add yet another line of revenue to The Guardian’s overall business, which has already built a substantial reader revenue program to complement its advertising efforts. 

Additionally, the advertising inventory alongside review sections can also function like retail media inventory, drawing heightened interest from marketers looking to reach consumers at the point of purchase.

And the new venture will help The Guardian diversify its editorial away from hard news—a theme that publishers like the Times have embraced as news consumption drops and advertisers skirt the category due to brand safety concerns.

In recent years, The Guardian has expanded beyond news into sports, health and wellness, games, and cooking. It launched Well Actually in late 2023 to capitalize on reader and advertiser interest in the wellness space, and it unveiled a slew of new soccer-focused editorial ventures to expand its presence in the sporting arena.

It recently launched a standalone application called Feast that hosts its food and drink content and costs $3.99 per month to access. It also recently expanded its games offerings, rolling out Wordiply in 2022, among a host of other products.

As hard news becomes an increasingly unappetizing space for brands, publishers will continue to expand beyond the sector into new categories and new lines of business.