Affiliate Disclosure

As of today there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site. Not one. This page exists so that the rules are published before there is money involved, rather than written to justify arrangements already in place.

What an affiliate link is

A link that pays the publisher if you click it and then sign up, deposit or buy. The payment is invisible to you at the point of clicking, which is precisely why disclosure matters: the incentive to recommend is not the same as the judgement that something is good.

Where affiliate links will never appear

These are permanent exclusions, not current practice that might drift:

• Safety content. Anything about custody, seed phrases, hardware wallets, backup strategy or scam avoidance. This is where a reader is most exposed and where a financial incentive would be most corrosive. If we tell you a hardware wallet practice is safer, no one is paying us to say it.
• Gambling and casinos, in any form. This domain previously hosted casino affiliate spam under different ownership. That is part of why the rule is absolute.
• Anything promising yield, returns or “guaranteed” outcomes.
• Inside The First-Principles Take. The Take is a reasoning structure. A commercial link inside it would corrupt the thing the publication is built on.

How they would be disclosed if we used them

A visible notice above the article body, not buried in a footer — the same placement rule as our risk notes. The link itself would carry rel="sponsored" so it is machine-readable as commercial. The disclosure would be specific about what the relationship is, and it would appear whether or not anyone would otherwise notice.

What money never buys

An affiliate relationship does not buy coverage, a favourable conclusion, placement in a list, or the removal of criticism. We would write the same assessment of a product whether or not a link paid us, and if that is not true of a given relationship then the correct decision is not to enter it.

We do not accept payment for articles, do not publish “sponsored analysis”, and do not sell links inside existing pieces. Requests to buy any of these are declined; see the advertise page for what is actually available.

Holding us to it

If you find a commercial link on this site without a disclosure, that is a serious failure and we want to know immediately — tell us and it will be fixed and logged at corrections. The full never-list is published in the editorial guidelines.