Can You Trust 6 Months Later?

By Josh Teder

Can you trust 6 Months Later? Or am I just some Apple, Google, or Samsung shill? And why am I even making this video?

Well, late last year, I came across something I naively just assumed didn’t really exist all that much on YouTube, which is a paid review. Why is a paid review bad? What’s the difference between a paid review and getting a product for free? I’m going to take you through all of that, plus our business model, so you can decide for yourself whether or not you can trust 6 Months Later, as well as all those random reviews you come across on different platforms.

How 6 Months Later Makes Money

So, first, how exactly does 6 Months Later make money? I get this question from my grandma at least three times a year. Don’t worry, Grandma, we’re doing okay. There are three main buckets to our revenue: AdSense revenue, Amazon and other affiliate revenue, and then direct brand sponsorships.

The reason why YouTube is still considered by many, including myself, to be the best creator platform out there is because of AdSense revenue sharing. Every time you see an ad in a YouTube video, someone paid YouTube to place that ad there. And as a YouTube channel, we get a 55% cut of every ad dollar spent to place ads in our long-form videos like this one. Shorts, while it still has revenue sharing, is a bit of a worse deal and harder to make money off of, for us at least. So, that’s one bucket.

Affiliate Revenue

For affiliate revenue, this comes from affiliate links that we place primarily on our website as well as here in our YouTube descriptions. For example, on our website, if you click the link to a door lock and buy it or buy anything else on Amazon, in this example, we would get a small percentage fee for bringing Amazon that sale. Same thing if you buy something from Best Buy via our shop page. You’ll always know it’s an affiliate link because, well, we’ll tell you it is.

And also, if you can do me a favor, don’t use those coupon code browser plugins. Some of those have allegedly been stealing away affiliate link sales from YouTube creators and also making up just bogus promo codes that don’t even work anyways, but still stealing away the affiliate link credit. So, if you want to continue to support small creators like myself, don’t use those browser plugins.

Honestly, the best way to get a discount for your first order from a new brand is just to sign up for their email list. I do this all the time. You’re giving the brand something valuable, which is putting you on an email list that you can always unsubscribe from later, and then you get something valuable in return. It’s more of a win-win scenario for both you as well as the brand that you’re shopping from.

Direct Ad Sales

Moving on to the third bucket, that’s direct ad sales. Now, here the model that has worked best for us is to burn in a 60 to 90 second ad that we produce for a particular brand. Some examples of recent videos have been Anker, Charge, or Loafrey. Typically, these are going to be tech and accessory brands that we don’t directly cover on the channel, but have products or services related to the ones that we do cover on the channel. These brands will pay us a fee to put that ad in our video, and then that helps us more quickly recoup the cost of the tech products that we purchase to review.

Oh, and then there’s the fourth bucket. After we review a product, unless it’s something I’ll keep for business purposes or want to review even longer, like a computer or writing tablet, often if we don’t have a need for that product anymore, we will sell it used on different platforms to help recoup more of that initial cost.

Our Ethics Policy

So, that’s how we make money. And the thing that’s helped guide us in how we operate — when we say no to brands for certain things and other forms of making money — is our ethics policy.

Our ethics policy has three big ideas.

No Individual Stock Ownership

First, no individual stock ownership. This is something I don’t think most reviewers on YouTube actually do, but I think is super important, especially if you’re a big tech reviewer. Like, let’s say you’re a giant tech reviewer on YouTube and, for example, you own Apple stock. And then this tech reviewer gives a rave review later in the year about the new Siri, its AI capabilities, and how great the new iPhone 18 Pro is. Their positive comments could cause Apple’s stock price to actually rise, which they would personally benefit from. So, to get rid of any conflict of interest, I just simply have a rule where no employee or owner of 6 Months Later is allowed to trade individual stocks of the companies that we cover.

Disclosures Everywhere

The second part of our ethics policy involves disclosures. I want you to know if a product that I’m reviewing was given to us by a company or if we purchased it ourselves, as well as if there’s a sponsor in the video, who that sponsor is, and clearly define which part of the video is the sponsored segment, which you’ll know by the logo at the start of the ad and the little ad bar at the bottom, as well as the disclosure at the start of the video within the first 30 to 45 seconds.

No Paid Reviews

Now, the third and probably biggest ticket item in our ethics policy is no paid reviews. We do not accept any payment from companies to make a review about their product. We don’t sign any contract saying we will make a review for brands. And we never agree to give a brand editorial control over our videos, including the ads we produce. By the way, if I’m not comfortable saying something a brand wants me to say, guess what? I’m not going to say it. And if we lose a brand deal over it, so be it. And yes, that has happened a few times over the years.

“We do not accept any payment from companies to make a review about their product. We don’t sign any contract saying we will make a review for brands. And we never agree to give a brand editorial control over our videos.”

What About Free Products?

Now, what about when we get a product from a brand at no cost? Isn’t that the same thing as being paid to review it? Fair question, but no. Not for us, at least. And there are a few reasons for that. For at least the past several years now, we don’t sign contracts stipulating we’ll make a review in exchange for a product. Now, there may have been a video that we did early in the channel’s history, which would have been a mistake if we had done that, but this has been our policy now for at least the past four years.

Now, why do we get a product from a brand? Often, this happens when I see a product is announced that hasn’t been released yet, and I try to get my hands on it as early as possible and then ask the brand to ship it to me. Or sometimes I’m really interested in a product, but I’m unsure about how it might perform on the channel. So, getting it from the brand at no cost is another way to derisk the time spent on that project.

But regardless of whether I get a product from a brand or we purchase it ourselves — we purchase around 80 to 90% of the products we review on the channel — either way, I always treat products as if I had purchased them myself. And if I don’t like a product and I piss off the brand and they don’t send us any more products, so be it. And yes, that has happened over the years.

Now, could you make an argument that continuing to get free products from a brand creates an incentive to not be critical of that brand so you keep getting their free products? Sure, if a channel relies mostly on that model, I think they’ll be more susceptible to conflicts of interest there. But for 6 Months Later, we simply don’t rely on getting products from brands all that often. It’s more of a rarity nowadays than the actual norm.

What Makes a Real Review?

The other difference between getting a product from a brand at no cost and being paid to make a review has to do with what a review actually is. A review is where I take you through the highlights, low lights, issues, features I didn’t use, and ultimately my recommendation on whether or not you should buy that product.

Look, it’s really hard to make an objective recommendation if the brand is literally paying you to make that video. You didn’t end up making a review. You likely just made an ad that has a review in the title. In order for it to be a true review, you shouldn’t have been paid to create it. And you must have full editorial control over the content, at least in my book.

“It’s really hard to make an objective recommendation if the brand is literally paying you to make that video. You didn’t end up making a review. You likely just made an ad that has a review in the title.”

Can You Trust Us?

So, can you trust 6 Months Later? After going through our ethics policy on no paid reviews, no individual stocks, disclosures everywhere, plus how we actually make money, I hope at the end of the day, you can trust the advice that you get from our channel and believe and support in our mission of reviewing things over the long term, not just after a two-week period.

So, if you trust and believe in our mission, make sure you’re subscribed and share our channel with others. That really helps us grow. And if you’re interested in becoming a reviewer for 6 Months Later, I am looking to expand the team. So definitely reach out to me via our contact page on our website. And if you have any suggestions or feedback on our ethics policy or disclosures, I’m always open to hearing them. So make sure you leave those in the comments below or in the contact form on our website.