It's not that it's wrong, but when someone stands to make money the assumptions we make about their motives change. If their whole business relies on advocating a fringe position I will not start with an assumption of good faith, or that they are just misinformed.
Given that money is required to both live and do this research, I'm curious to hear what the alternative is.
I don't know the economics of it, but they could run ads on their site, become a non profit & only accept donations, etc etc.
This is slightly unrelated, but I remember in the 2000s, there was a vendor of protein powders who started testing his and other vendors protein powders to see if their labels were true & they weren't protein spiking (adding cheaper collagen instead of whey lying on the labels, essentially). He almost immediately got sued from several large mfgs and had to shut down.
So, for this group, and the fact that they're ignoring cease & desist letters from the toothpaste mfgs they're testing puts them in HUGE legal risk, I suspect, and would not be the least bit surprised if all the funds they're collecting are going to end up in lawyers pockets.
> but they could run ads on their site
My dude, what do you think those affiliate links are?
I mean like Google Adsense or any other type of advertising that do not use affiliate links for the specific products they mention.
As I said it's not wrong itself. They just have a steeper hill to climb in terms of evidence for their position.