Advertising & sponsorship policy

Here’s how I handle advertising and sponsorship:

Direct advertising – advertisers pay the creator directly to advertise their products in the form of advertisement media, for example banner ads.
Indirect advertising – advertisers engage a social media company or similar to advertise their products. The media company places the ads in the most appropriate locations. The creator has no control over which ads are shown on their content, and the ads are tailored to each viewer. All the creator can do is turn off ads, or in some cases, say where an ad break should be, or perhaps deny a specific category of ads for example gambling.
Sponsorship – direct payment to the creator in money or product for exposure of the company’s products or services. This is different to advertising as the product is embedded into the content. The creator may, and generally does promote the product throughout their content, e.g by using it, wearing company apparel, stickers on vehicles.
Paid product reviews – the company pays a creator to review their product and controls the content to a lesser, or usually greater extent. Note – the fact a company reviews a product ahead of content publication does not necessarily imply it is a paid product review. This is good practice regardless of any payment.
Supporter Funding – platforms such as Patreon where people can support a creator with donations, with the creator typically offering some kind of benefit e.g. early access to videos, support, discounts.

Independence shall not be compromised by allowing any company to influence content. In addition, independence must be visibly maintained; the two are not the same as sometimes one can appear to be independent, and not be, or be independent and appear not to be.
Direct advertising is preferred (e.g. YouTube ads) as there is no connection between advertiser and content creator.
Limited semi-direct advertising is used on this website subject to the following conditions; a) there is no sponsorship b) the advertising is handling through our agency partner c) there is no obligation, expectation or requirement that any of the advertiser’s products or services are promoted, preferenced, or compared favourably to any other. The deal is simply that ad space is made available.
No sponsorship is accepted from any organisation which could influence the subject matter covered. Potential sponsorship may be considered from organisations which are outside the subject matter specialisation.
No paid product reviews. However, on occasions, product may be supplied free of charge for analysis but there must be no expectation any review would be positive.
Supporter funding, currently via Patreon, is a priority strategy with the intent to build a better content and social media world for all.

GoWeigh run adverts on this website. I also consult to them for the purposes of product development on an ad-hoc basis.