Advertising
This site carries paid notices under one eligibility rule, stated here in full so that anybody can check whether it was followed.
The eligibility rule
An advertiser must be permanently outside this site's remit. Not graded well. Never graded, and never gradeable.
Eligibility keyed to a grade would make the grade commercially valuable to the company receiving it. At that point every A on this site is worth money to somebody, and a reader has no way to tell an earned grade from a sold one.
Keying eligibility to being outside the remit removes the transaction entirely. There's no grade to buy, because there's no grade. A company that could ever appear on the scoreboard can't advertise here, however well it would score.
Who that leaves
The remit is the ad-data chain: platforms, retail media, publishers running their own graphs, adtech, brokers, and identity resolution. An eligible advertiser is one that doesn't sit anywhere on that chain and couldn't plausibly be added to it.
In practice that has meant:
- Tools that don't collect behavioural data at all.
- Books, magazines and events.
- Independent software sold for money, not attention.
- Organisations working on the same problem from the other side.
It rules out anything with an advertising business, anything with a loyalty scheme, and anything whose product is a customer data platform, however good their privacy policy is. That's the rule working, not the rule failing.
Terms
- Notices are static text and a link. No scripts, no tracking pixels, no third-party requests.
- No advertiser sees a verdict before it's published, and no advertiser is told what's coming.
- Paid notices are labelled as paid, on every page they appear on.
- If an advertiser later comes inside the remit, say by buying an ad network or launching a loyalty scheme, the notice ends at the next billing period and the reason is published on corrections.
No paid notices are running. When some are, this page will say so, name them, and itemise what was paid.
Enquiries
Eligibility is checked before anything else, and the check is the rule above, not a judgement call. If you're unsure whether you're outside the remit, you probably aren't, but ask anyway. See contact.