Editorial Policy

Four principles

Traceable over plausible. A figure is publishable when it can be traced to a source we can name and date. A figure that sounds right but cannot be traced does not go on the page, even when leaving it out makes a section thinner.

Independent of revenue. Editorial judgements are made without reference to which platforms pay us. The commercial arrangement is disclosed and it is real, but it does not decide what a page says.

Honest about gaps. When we cannot resolve a question, the page states the gap rather than covering it with confident phrasing. Readers make better decisions with a marked hole than with a smooth surface hiding one.

Dated, not timeless. Advertising pricing changes constantly. Every page shows when its sources were checked, so nothing pretends to be permanently current.

Which sources count

We work in a strict order of preference, and the order matters more than any individual source.

• Primary documentation. A platform's own documentation, published terms and interface. This is where capabilities, thresholds, formats and integrations come from.
• Official policy texts. Where the rules of a major advertising programme are relevant, we read the published policy itself and link to it, rather than repeating a summary written by someone else.
• Named research with a date. Industry studies and measurement reports, cited with the organisation and the period they cover, so a reader can judge whether the figure has aged.
• Dated user evidence. Feedback on independent affiliate forums, attributed and dated, presented as testimony rather than as fact. A single post proves nothing; a repeated complaint across months is worth recording.

Competitor articles are not a source. They copy from each other, and a figure that appears in five reviews without appearing in any primary document has usually been propagated rather than checked. We read them only to see which questions the existing coverage leaves unanswered.

How a page is made

Step one, the question. We start from a commercial decision a reader is actually trying to make, such as where to buy website traffic for a specific market, then write down the sub-questions that decision depends on. A section that answers none of them is cut before it is written.

Step two, the evidence. Each question is matched to sources in the order above. Questions that end up with no source are marked as unresolved and stay marked in the finished page.

Step three, the draft. The person who did the research writes the page. We do not hand verified notes to a separate writer, because the caveats are the first thing lost in that handover.

Step four, the adversarial read. The draft is read again with the opposite intention: to find the sentence that would be equally true of any competitor, the claim without a source, the paragraph that could be deleted without losing an answer. Whatever survives that read is what publishes.

Step five, publication. The page goes live with a named author, a job title and the date sources were checked. Nothing publishes anonymously.

Step six, revision. Pages are revisited when a platform changes its terms, when new research supersedes a figure we used, or when a reader reports an error. The date at the top changes with the content, never on its own.

What we check before publishing

Capabilities and thresholds are confirmed against the platform's own material rather than against a third-party listing, because listings in this niche run years behind. We have found current-year articles describing an advertising network by a format it had already dropped, while omitting formats added since.

Policy claims are confirmed by reading the policy. Where a policy distinguishes between two outcomes that look similar to a casual reader, such as a temporary suspension and a permanent closure, we describe the distinction rather than collapsing it.

Company-supplied statistics are labelled as such, and the reasoning behind every figure is available to anyone who asks through our contact page. When a platform reports its own daily volumes, the page says the figures are self-reported and unaudited, and where the ratios between them imply something a reader should treat carefully, we say that too.

Commercial relationships

The site earns commission when readers open accounts with platforms we write about. That relationship is disclosed and it funds the work, and it is kept out of editorial decisions by a rule that is easy to audit from outside: every page about a platform names concrete weaknesses.

We publish negative user feedback about platforms we earn from, with the date and the source. We state when rates are hidden until registration. We flag where a stated minimum deposit does not apply to every payment method. None of that is comfortable commercially, and all of it stays in.

We do not accept payment for a specific rating, a specific placement, or the removal of criticism. Where a platform asks for any of those as a condition of partnership, we decline the partnership rather than the criticism. The commercial terms readers deal with are described in our terms and conditions.

Corrections

Report an error to the editorial address on our contact page, quoting the page and the sentence. We check the claim against its source and respond, normally within two business days.

Confirmed factual errors are fixed immediately and the revision date is updated. Where the correction changes the meaning of a section rather than a detail, we note what changed so a returning reader is not left wondering whether they misremembered.

We do not quietly delete material that has become inconvenient. If a page is withdrawn, the reason is stated. Requests to remove accurate criticism are declined.

Who may write here

Contributors must have direct commercial experience buying the kind of traffic they write about. Writing produced from secondary sources by someone who has never run a campaign is exactly the material this site was built to replace.

Every contributor writes under a real name with a linked profile, and must disclose any relationship with a platform they cover. Invented first-hand measurements are prohibited without exception: a fabricated figure is the single thing that would justify distrusting everything else on the site. Our lead author sets out his own limits on the author page.