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OUR MISSION OF
RADICAL TRANSPARENCY
How We Make Money
Everyone’s gotta eat. Fact is, we have to make money somehow, otherwise the lights go out and some of us get scared. But we can’t make everything we do be about the greenbacks. There’s more to life than just the bottom line, and that means we’re doing things a little different.
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BAKIN’
COOKIES
DONATIONS
We’re actively working to move away from relying solely on Amazon as our primary source of income, though. But if affiliate marketing doesn’t vibe with you, we offer the simplest method ever devised to show support: donations. If we’ve helped you in a meaningful way when choosing a product, you can forgo the cookies and affiliate marketing and just toss us a buck.
We are READER SUPPORTED. If you find something that you find valuable, click through our affiliate links to support us. The magic of the (often correctly) maligned cookie – a data file that remembers you visited us for a period of time – will take care of the rest. It’s an easy way for websites to talk to each other, and it’s how our site tells our partners we sent someone over. After 24 hours, the cookie dissolves on its own. It remains our only method of generating revenue at the moment. If you’d rather turn off affiliate cookies, then please consider our privacy policy. How much of a cut? With Amazon, our primary affiliate marketing partner, there’s a breakdown depending on what gets purchased. Otherwise, that’s it.
A second part of our strategy for generating revenue is implementing search engine optimization into how we structure our site. You won’t necessarily see it, but it’s there, and it’s doing what it needs to.
Specifically, we work to build topical authority, use intent matching, and utilize machine learning to build our site to better drive traffic to it.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
TOPICAL AUTHORITY
Topical authority is building up the perception that you have a strong command of a specific subject. When you find a site called RhinosAreUs, you’d automatically expect them to be pretty good for learning about rhinos. And their content would ideally reflect that. We do the same thing, but we work to build authority on gadgets, from TVs to toasters.
INTENT MATCHING
Intent matching is simply trying to match the reason that someone is searching for something to how your content is built. This means we structure content to try to account for why someone would be searching for a variety of terms. For example, if we’re interested in drawing in someone searching for “easy to clean toasters”, we build pages featuring those kinds of toasters, as well as things like guides on using them.
MACHINE LEARNING
To help us round things out, and keep this explanation from becoming dryer and longer than it already is, we also use machine learning to better understand what people are searching for. Humans eyes and hands can only work so far and connect concepts so quickly. By kicking stuff that takes a while to crunch through to a robot, we can make better choices to drive traffic to our site.
We are particularly focused on Natural Language Processing, or NLP, and are digging further into using it.
All of this is in service to help drive up how many people get eyes on what we’re doing. We think our mission is worth supporting and making visible – otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. And with search engines like Google making certain topics more difficult to reach or more likely to rank poorly, we want to keep ahead of the curve.
A GOODBYE
TO (most) ADS!
Being reader supported means that we don’t have display ads all over the site. I mean, have you seen how web pages look these days? Banners up there, banners over there, banners down there, pop-over ads… It never ends! Instead, we carefully curate select pages to display certain types of ads and all the while limit the number of actual ads so your head isn’t spinning.
OUR ETHICS POLICY
Our ethics policy is straightforward: We believe in doing the right thing.
What is the right thing? Glad you asked. We believe in these five principles.
TRANSPARENCY
We’re all about giving you a window in. A proper window, you know, that’s clean and clear and doesn’t have some puppet show going on to distract you. You deserve to know what we do, how we do it, and how it gets us paid.
ACCOUNTABILITY
You know those people that just love when someone passes the buck? You know, all zero people that like when that happens? If something is on us, it’s on us. We own up to our mistakes. If someone else messed something up, we’ll do our best to get you the info you’ll need.
TRUSTWORTHINESS
If you don’t trust us, why would you ever come back? It’s one thing to say you’ll act in a trustworthy way, it’s another to lay out everything you do to make sure it’s worth being trusted. That’s the whole point of this ethics policy.
FAIRNESS
We’re not quite Lady Justice (none of us have swords) but we’re close enough! We’re not in this to favor someone or something – we’re in this to serve you. The numbers, the data, everything we’ve baked into our scores is designed to be fair.
INDEPENDENCE
We might make money through affiliate marketing but that doesn’t mean we’ve got owners. Backroom deals, mysterious suitcases – that ain’t us. You don’t make money long in a town that knows all you’ve got is snake oil.
Because we’re supported by you, we live and die by you. You vote with your money, not just with what you buy, but how you bought it. If you trust us, start with us. We’re here to make sure your money is going towards something truly valuable.
That means we have a list of things we don’t do, and we pledge to keep it that way:
NOTHING WE DON’T TRUST
We don’t recommend any product that didn’t get enough backing. We’ll give it a TrueScore, but don’t expect it to score well or catch any awards. As far as we’re concerned, anything with just a handful of ratings and a single expert review doesn’t stir much confidence.
NO FAVORITES
We’re not here to play favorites, we’re here to give you useful information. If something gets our praise, it’s because the product measured up to our performance criteria, not because we favor it.
NO INFLUENCES
We’re not useful to you if we just let manufacturers slip us something under the table so they can get a few extra points on their TrueScores. If a manufacturer makes good products, the scores will show it. If they don’t, the scores will show it.
FORWARD, FAST, FREE
We want to give you everything you need right away. No “free samples” – you get the whole damn hot dog. No delays or timers that keep information locked off for a mandatory wait time. No hoops to jump through. And all of it free. F, R, E, E.
NO BLINDSIDING
In the future, we may dabble with native or sponsored content. And that means it’ll be clearly labeled as such. No tricks and no breaks – native and sponsored content will always feature undoctored TrueScores.