How we make money
Short version: some of the links on this site are adverts. We get paid when you buy through them. That never changes what we say about a product.
Longer version, because you should be looking for the catch.
The links marked “Ad”
When we link to a shop, that link sometimes earns us a cut of what you spend. It costs you nothing and the price is the same either way.
Every link like that is marked “Ad”, right next to the link. Not at the bottom of the page, not buried in a footer, next to the thing itself, so you know before you click rather than after.
Links without that mark earn us nothing. We use plenty of them, because sometimes the best answer is a shop that has never heard of us.
What that money does not buy
It does not buy a verdict. We decide whether something is worth it before we look at whether we can make anything from it, and the people writing the verdicts work from a record that does not contain commission rates, because we keep them somewhere else entirely. You cannot be swayed by a number you are not shown.
It does not buy a place on a list. A product with no affiliate programme anywhere still gets covered, and still wins if it is the best thing. If that were not true, this site would be a shop window with opinions.
It does not buy a good word. Plenty of pages here end with “it’s good, but we think this is better” and then send you to something cheaper we may earn nothing from. Those are the most useful pages on the site, and they are the reason to trust the rest.
Checking our own homework
Anyone can write the three paragraphs above. So we measure whether they are true of what we actually publish, and show you the result.
Two things we watch:
- Can something we earn nothing from still win? If everything we recommend happens to pay us, that is a pattern worth explaining, whatever we intended.
- Is the gap widening? We compare how often a recommended product has a paid link against how often everything else does.
Neither of these proves we are clean. A gap can have a dull explanation, big brands run affiliate programmes and big brands sometimes make good things. But a number that moves is a question someone has to answer, and a promise nobody measures is just a nice sentence.
The other money
House adverts. We run the occasional plug for henry.careers, which is ours. It is marked like any other advert and it counts against the same limited ad space, because a plug for ourselves is not free just because the money stays in the family.
Nothing else, for now. No sponsored posts. No paid placements. No paying to be reviewed. If that ever changes, it changes here first and it will be obvious on the page, not tucked into a policy.
Things we deliberately do not do
- No pop-ups asking for your email before you have read anything
- No “only 2 left!” when we have no idea how many are left
- No cookies for advertising or tracking; our analytics do not follow you around
- No writing about investments, pensions, mortgages or insurance, which are regulated and not our business
The gross-cost numbers
The “you earned £X to buy this” figures are a joke with real arithmetic behind it. They use published HMRC and Scottish Government rates, and we show the working.
They are illustrative. They are not tax advice, they do not know your circumstances, and we are not going to tell you what to do with your money.
The product photographs
The pictures on our product pages are the makers’ own, served from the makers’ own websites. We do not copy them, we do not keep them, and we do not host them. If a maker changes or removes a picture, it changes or disappears here too.
If you own one and would rather we did not point at it, tell us and we will stop. No argument, no form, no conditions. Say which product and we will remove the picture.
What we will not do is remove the write-up along with it. If we have said something about a product, taking the photograph away does not unsay it. The page stays, with a gap where the picture was. That cuts both ways and it is meant to: a brand we have praised keeps its review, and a brand we have criticised does not get to delete the criticism by objecting to a photo.
Telling us we have got it wrong
If something here is wrong, out of date, or reads like we were paid for it, say so and we will fix it or explain ourselves.
Captivated Ltd, Sheffield.