Advertising & affiliate disclosure

Display advertising

Display ads on this site, including Google AdSense, are labeled Advertisement where they appear. They are sold programmatically: an ad network fills the slot, and we do not choose, review, or approve the individual advertisers who appear.

What follows from that, and is worth stating plainly:

• An ad appearing next to an article is not an endorsement of the advertiser by us, and it is not an endorsement of the article by the advertiser.
• Advertisers cannot buy a mention, a position, or a favorable line in editorial content. Those things are not for sale at any price.
• Ad slots are placed in fixed positions in the page template. An article is never structured, lengthened, or broken up to create more inventory.

Affiliate links

Some pages link to retailers or vendors through affiliate programs. If you follow one and buy something, this site may earn a commission. It does not change your price.

Every affiliate link carries rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup, which is the honest technical declaration of a paid relationship — both to search engines and to anyone who inspects the page.

The editorial rules around them are absolute:

• Conclusions are reached before links are attached. The recommendation comes first; the link is plumbing added afterward.
• No product is added, removed, or reordered because of commission rates. A product with no affiliate program available sits alongside one that pays well, ranked purely on merit.
• "Do not buy this" is a normal outcome. Recommending against a product we could have earned from happens regularly, and no one is consulted before it ships.
• An affiliate page owes you more, not less. A page that would be worthless with the links removed should not have been published.

Which links are which

Not every outbound link means the same thing, so this site distinguishes them in markup:

• Affiliate and paid links: rel="sponsored nofollow". A commercial relationship exists.
• Sources we cite: ordinary followed links. Citing evidence is endorsing it as evidence, and marking a citation as paid would be a lie about the page's own reasoning.
• Other outbound links: nofollow. Referenced without a relationship being claimed.

What advertising does not touch

• Topic selection. Subjects are chosen from reader need — a keyword is never a page. Commercial partners are not consulted, and do not know what is coming.
• Drafts. No advertiser or affiliate partner sees an article before publication.
• Conclusions and corrections. Neither is negotiable, and a correction is never withheld because it is commercially inconvenient.
• Data about you. Reader data is not sold. What ad partners collect through their own tags is described in Privacy and Cookie policy.

Sponsored content

If SXM Wire ever publishes content that was paid for, it will be labeled as sponsored at the top of the page, before the body, in language a reader cannot mistake — not in a footer, not in a colophon, and not as a subtle "partner" tag. It will also be excluded from the editorial process described in Editorial policy, because it is not editorial.

How links are labeled

Three kinds of outbound link appear here, and they are marked so that both you and a search engine can tell them apart.

Affiliate links point to a retailer or vendor and may pay a commission if you buy. They carry the sponsored and nofollow markers that search engines use to identify commercial links, and the pages that contain them say so on the page.

Citation links point at the evidence for a claim: documentation, a specification, a filing, a study. They pay nothing. They exist so the claim can be checked, and they are the reason articles link to sources including competitors.

Internal links point to other pages here, and are included when the other page genuinely helps with the same decision.

The labeling is not cosmetic. Search engines treat an unmarked commercial link as an attempt to pass ranking credit that was paid for, and publishers who do that are treating both readers and the index as marks. Marking them correctly costs nothing if you are not doing that.

The wall between money and conclusions

The rule is short: no advertiser, affiliate program, or commercial partner has any influence over what is written, what conclusion a page reaches, or whether a subject is covered.

In practice that means several specific things.

• A recommendation is never assigned to a product because it pays more. Where two products are close and one is affiliated, the page says which is which and why the recommendation went the way it did.
• Negative findings publish. A product that is bad is described as bad in the same page that links to where you could buy it, if the link was already there.
• Advertisers do not see articles before publication and are not told what is coming.
• Pulling advertising is not a lever. A company that withdraws spend over coverage has changed our revenue and nothing else.
• Coverage decisions are made before monetization is considered, in the order set out in Editorial policy.

What we decline

The offers below arrive regularly and are declined without exception, so listing them here saves everyone the exchange:

• Paid links, link insertions into existing articles, and link exchanges.
• Sponsored articles presented as editorial, whether or not a disclosure is offered.
• Payment for a review, for a ranking position, or for a specific rating.
• Payment to remove or soften accurate coverage.
• Guest posts, which are not published here in any form.

None of these are negotiable at a higher price, which is the only relevant thing to know about them.

Where ads appear, and where they do not

Ad placements live in fixed positions in the page template: within the flow of a long article at intervals, in the sidebar on wide screens, and as an anchor unit on smaller ones. They are the same positions on every page of a given type.

That fixity is the point. When inventory is fixed, an article cannot be lengthened, split across pages, or chopped into more sections to create more of it. Pagination that exists to multiply page views is a tax on the reader, and this site does not levy it — every article is one page, however long it is.

Positions ads are not permitted to take:

• Above the headline, so the first thing on the page is always the article.
• Inside a table, a code block, or a figure, where an ad would break the thing a reader came to read.
• Anywhere that obscures body text or requires dismissal before reading can continue.
• Anywhere designed to be mistaken for editorial content or for a navigation control.

What we ask of the ad networks

Programmatic advertising means we do not pick the individual advertisers. We do set category controls, and we exclude the categories that make a site worse to read: ads that auto-play sound, ads that expand over content, ads that mimic system alerts, and the "one weird trick" family of creatives that are functionally scams.

Blocking is not perfect. Networks change inventory constantly, and something ugly gets through periodically. Which brings us to the most useful thing in this section: if you see a bad ad, screenshot it and send it. A report with an image is actionable, because it usually contains enough to identify and block the specific creative.

Ad blockers

If you run a content blocker, that is fine, and this page is not going to lecture you about it.

The site is built so that blocked advertising costs you nothing: no wall, no nag, no degraded layout, no missing content. Ads are additive. The best thing an ad-blocking reader can do for this site is link to a page that helped, which is worth more than the impression would have been.

Why disclosure appears on the page itself

A monetization disclosure that lives only on a policy page is a disclosure designed not to be read. Pages carrying affiliate links say so on the page, near the links, where the decision is actually being made.

The reasoning is simple: the reader considering a purchase is the person the disclosure is for, and they are on the article, not here. Making them find this page first would be a design that technically discloses and practically does not.

What the money actually pays for

Advertising and affiliate revenue pay for the research time behind pages, the sources and tools used to compile them, and the infrastructure that serves the site. It is a modest operation, and revenue scales with readership rather than with anything a reader would rather we did not do.

Stating that plainly is deliberate too. The alternative business models for a site like this one — selling links, publishing sponsored posts as editorial, or renting the audience to a data broker — are all more lucrative per page and all incompatible with the Editorial policy. Being clear about where the money comes from is how a reader can check that we did not quietly take one of them.

Questions and complaints

If a page looks like the commercial side reached into it, that is exactly the thing worth writing to us about. Send the URL and what looked wrong. Use the contact form on this site when it is available, or reach the publisher through the domain WHOIS for sxmwire.com.

See also: Editorial policy, About SXM Wire, Privacy, Terms of use.