Affiliate marketing has a bad rep and for good reason. They're frequently abused with little transparancy behind their usage and influence on the content you access every day.
However, affiliate marketing offers the utmost creative freedom to individuals without relying on a traditional sponsorship relationship where conflicts of interest may arise.
As individuals, we crave the creative freedom to select and drop our sources of income at will; this document expalins how we prevent conflicts of interest and maintain transparancy behind what we recommend to our audience.
The simplest form of affiliations we utilize our VPNs, but these have a separate explanation in the VPN repo here as there is an additional systematic process layered above this document for an additional layer of transparancy.
Our non-VPN affiliates are chosen by answering 5 questions:
- Would we genuinely recommend this to our friends and family?
- Who in our audience would benefit from this?
- Who in our audience would NOT benefit from this?
- Why is there a discrepancy, if any?
- Are we able address both the pros and cons when talking about this affiliate plan without misleading viewers?
If we answer these questions and feel a service is not only a positive experience, but it's capable of being recommended without viewers misled--they can qualify as an affiliate.
Here are our current affiliate plans. Some have rarely (or ever) been mentioned in our content. This is due to us not finding a right fit for the service, as we try to keep recommendations relevant to the content. We don't want to recommend shaving cream to our audience.
- Amazon
- Brave Rewards
- ProtonMail
- SimpleLogin
- Orange Website
- Trezor Wallet
- Jumbo Privacy
- Abine DeleteMe
Links above are the affiliate links themselves.
At any point in time, if we feel something changes, or our audience overwhelmingly doesn't agree with our decision, we hold every right and ability to cease the affiliate plan--as we have the freedom to do so by avoiding all traditional sponsorship roles.
Are you a service looking to offer us an affiliate plan? Don't bother sending us the commission rates, potential earnings, or any other metrics--we frankly don't care.
We believe your service should speak for itself. Send us what you're doing and what you hope to solve in the world. We'll use your product and extensively test it. After testing, we'll ask our 5 questions to help decide if this something beneficial to our audience.
Seriously, please don't send the commission rates, we don't look at them. Our audience cares about receiving unbiased recommendations, not how much money we make from them. But, if we're able to recommend something we believe in and make some extra cash to stay afloat along the way--count us in.