How we make money

Why there is advertising at all

Because the alternative is worse. Every answer on this site costs real money to produce — searching, reading the sources, checking the quotes against the documents they came from. That has to be paid for by somebody, and there are only a few candidates: readers, advertisers, sponsors, or a funder with a view.

A paywall would put evidence behind a price at the exact moment someone needs it, which defeats the purpose. Sponsorship and funding both mean somebody with an interest in the answers is writing the cheque. Advertising, served by a network that never learns what page it is on, is the only one of the four where the people paying have no route to the thing they would want to change.

So the ads are not an apology. They are the arrangement that keeps this free to read, free to check, and answerable to nobody but the evidence.

What we will never do

No sponsored answers. No sponsored verdicts. No advertiser-funded topics, no “in partnership with” anything, no affiliate links, no paid placement of a source, and no arrangement — named or unnamed — under which money reaches an answer.

This is stated as a permanent commitment rather than a current policy, and the reason is self-interested as much as principled. The only thing this site has to offer is that its answers follow the evidence and nothing else. A site known to have been reached by an advertiser once is a site whose every previous answer becomes worth less — including all the honest ones. There is no amount of revenue that buys back a reputation for independence, so there is no price at which the trade makes sense.

What advertisers cannot do

None of the following is a policy we intend to keep. They are things the system is built so as not to permit.

• Sponsor an answer. There is no paid placement in an answer, no promoted verdict, and no arrangement under which money changes what the evidence is said to show.
• See an answer before it is published. Nobody outside this site reads an answer in advance — not an advertiser, not an agency, not a PR firm.
• Appear inside an answer. Ads live in the sidebar. Never between paragraphs, never in the evidence list, never in the sources.
• Ask for one to be changed or removed. Corrections come from evidence. An advertiser who dislikes an answer is welcome to point at the line, the same as anyone else, and gets no more weight for having paid.
• Buy their way out of a subject. We do not sell exclusion from claims about an industry.

Where the ads come from

Google AdSense. Google chooses the advertiser, the creative and the price. We choose one thing: the single place on the page an ad may appear. We pass Google nothing about the answer it is sitting beside — no keywords, no topic, no verdict, no claim text.

That is deliberate rather than incidental. The surest way to guarantee an advertiser cannot reach an answer is for the advertising system and the answer system to share no data at all, so that is how it is wired.

Where ads are switched off

Some answers carry no advertising, decided automatically before the page is ever built:

• Anything a human has not yet reviewed. An answer waiting in the queue is readable by anyone with the link and earns nothing.
• Health claims we are not confident about. Where the evidence is thin on a medical question, the page carries no ad. Taking money beside a shaky health answer is the exact trade this site exists to argue against.

Being a named individual does not switch ads off. That was considered and decided against, for reasons recorded in the public decision log.

What data is collected

Google and its partners may use cookies and similar technologies to serve and measure advertising, including personalised advertising where you have consented to it. That processing is Google’s, under its own terms, and you can review or change your ad settings at Google My Ad Center.

We do not sell data, run our own advertising profiles, or ask you to make an account. Reading an answer requires nothing from you.

Why this model and not another

A fresh answer costs a meaningful amount to produce and an ad impression earns a fraction of a penny. The gap is closed by the same answer being read many times — so the incentive this site actually has is to write an answer good enough to be worth linking to, not to generate as many as possible.

That is a happier alignment than most, and it is not a guarantee of virtue. It is simply the shape of the arithmetic, and you should hold us to the published instructions rather than to our good intentions.