What we publish, what we refuse, and who pays us

The firewall

Ranking position is not for sale, and this is enforced structurally rather than promised. Order is computed from the effective hourly rate, which is derived from federal tax and census records. There is no editorial override and no field that a commercial relationship could write to. No advertiser, partner or platform can change whether a method appears on this site or where it sits.

That is the invariant. It is not the same as refusing all commerce, and we no longer pretend it is.

How paid links work here

This site carries advertising and some paid links. That is how it stays free to read and free of a paywall over public data. The rule governing them is simple and it is the same rule serious review publications use: a paid link may follow a conclusion, never lead one.

In practice that means the data selects the method first. Only then are the tools or platforms you would actually need listed, in a separately labelled block placed below the figures. If a method requires a tool we earn nothing from, that tool is still listed. If a tool pays well but the method ranks badly, the method still ranks badly.

• No paid link ever appears inside a results table, a comparison or a statistic.
• No advertising unit is placed inside a data surface, so an advert can never be mistaken for a finding.
• Paid links are labelled where they appear, not only in a policy page you have to go looking for.
• A method is never added, removed or reordered because of a commercial relationship.

See every commercial relationship we hold

What we will never sell

Courses, coaching, systems, mentorship, masterminds, or any product whose value proposition is that we know how you can make money. This is the single conflict that produces everything wrong with this field: when the teacher's income comes from teaching rather than from doing, the incentive to overstate is permanent and unfixable by disclosure. It is the one revenue line permanently closed to us, and closing it is what makes the rest defensible.

What gets published

A method record does not go live because it is popular or because it would attract traffic. It goes live when it can carry its own evidence. Records failing any of these stay unpublished rather than shipping with the gap hidden:

• A real population denominator behind the failure rate, drawn from tax or census records.
• At least one piece of population-level or official platform evidence.
• Every required field filled, including who should not attempt this and what would kill it.
• Figures distinct enough from other records to be worth a separate page. Where two methods share a federal denominator, one page covers both rather than two pages repeating one number.

Corrections

Report a figure you believe is wrong and include the method, the number you are disputing and the source you think is right. We aim to respond within five working days. Corrections that hold up are applied and noted on the record itself, with the date and what changed — not silently edited.

Where we get something wrong badly enough to have misled someone about a financial decision, the correction goes at the top of the record, not in a footnote.

Retiring a method

When a method stops working it is marked dead, given a date and a cause, and kept published as an obituary. Most content in this field is a corpse that still ranks — written once when the method worked and never revisited. Deleting it quietly would be easier and would help our numbers. Keeping it visible is more useful to the person who was about to start.

On generated content

We use software to assemble records from structured data, and we say so. What we do not do is generate prose to fill pages, produce near-identical variants of a page to capture more search queries, or publish a figure that no source stands behind. A page exists here because it carries data somebody can check, or it does not exist.