Editorial Policy

This page describes how material on this site is researched, checked, funded and corrected. It exists so that a reader can judge our output against a stated standard rather than against a general impression of trustworthiness, and so that we have something to be held to when we fall short.

It is not a statement of aspiration. Every rule below is one we apply, and several of them cost us traffic or revenue, which is the only real evidence that a policy document means anything.

Where Facts Come From

Primary sources take precedence over everything. A platform policy is quoted from the policy page itself, with its own wording, not from an article summarising it. A standards change comes from the standards body's announcement, with the date it published. A platform feature is described from the platform's documentation or interface, not from a review of it.

Competitor articles are not a source. We read them to understand what a subject already covers, and we take nothing factual from them. The reason is specific to this niche: pop advertising coverage recycles the same handful of figures between sites until an unattributed number acquires the appearance of consensus. Tracing several of those numbers to their origin produced, in each case, a single directory entry with no methodology attached.

Where sources conflict, we publish the conflict rather than resolving it silently. Popunder Ads tells the reader outright that two pages published by the same organisation give different dates for the same event, and which one is internally consistent. That is more useful than picking one and looking decisive.

What Happens When a Gap Appears

When we look for something and cannot find it, the page says so in those words. There are sentences on this site reading "I found no independent measurement to check this against" and "none of those figures carries the platform's own name". They stay.

The alternative, filling a gap with a confident estimate, is the single most common failure in this category of content and the hardest for a reader to detect. A stated gap can be checked. A fabricated number reads exactly like a researched one until someone tries to use it.

Claims of First-Hand Experience

We do not invent measurements. If nobody here has run a campaign, we do not write that we did, and we publish no specific figure, timing or conversion rate presented as our own observation unless it is one.

What we do publish as first-hand is what genuinely is: what a platform's interface shows, what its documentation says, what its policy pages contain, what changed between two checks. Reading a cabinet and describing what is on the screen is direct observation. Claiming a payout arrived in twenty-six hours when nobody requested one is a lie a reader can catch, and it would rightly end their trust in everything else on the page.

How Money Works and Where It Stops

The site is funded by commercial links. If a reader opens an account with a platform through one, that platform may pay us. Readers pay nothing extra and receive the same terms they would receive arriving directly.

Four things that revenue does not buy. It does not buy the removal of a documented limitation: the platform we link to most often has three of its weaknesses named on our pages, including two things it would clearly prefer unmentioned. It does not buy pre-publication approval; no commercial partner sees a draft. It does not buy placement, because we publish no ranked lists in which placement could be sold. It does not buy silence on policy risk, which is why our coverage explains in detail the circumstances under which a publisher using this format loses access to Google demand entirely.

If a partner required any of those as a condition, the arrangement would end. That is easy to assert, so the practical test is the one a reader can run without trusting us: count the negative statements about commercially linked platforms on our pages. There are several, they are specific, and they are not buried.

Authorship and Dates

Every page carries a named author with a profile and a publication date. That date never changes once set, because rewriting it to look fresh is a deception that search engines and readers both eventually notice. Freshness is instead carried where it belongs: on the figures themselves. A page quoting a platform minimum states the day that minimum was read and the document it came from, so a reader can tell a number checked this week from one repeated out of habit.

We do not publish under a house byline or an invented persona. A page with no accountable author is a page nobody has to answer for. Our contributors are listed with their background on the author profile.

Review Cycle

Pages covering pricing and platform features are re-checked quarterly, because both move faster than an annual cycle can track. Pages covering third-party policy are re-checked whenever the policy owner announces a change and at minimum twice a year. Pages covering mechanics that do not change, such as how an auction meters an impression, are reviewed annually.

A re-check that finds nothing changed is recorded internally but changes nothing on the page, because editing a date to imply work that produced no change is the small dishonesty this whole policy exists to avoid. A re-check that finds a change produces an edit, an updated reading date on the affected figure and, where the change reverses something we previously told readers, a visible correction note.

Corrections

Factual errors are acknowledged within 24 hours and fixed within two working days. The fix is dated on the page. Where the error was material, meaning a reader could have acted on it and lost money or breached a policy, the correction is noted visibly rather than absorbed into the text, so that the record of what we got wrong survives the fixing of it.

We do not delete pages to make errors disappear. If a page becomes obsolete, it is updated or marked as superseded, not removed. Reports of errors go to the contact page and take priority over every other category of message; the most useful report names the page, quotes the disputed sentence and links to a contradicting source.

What Never Gets Published

Ranked lists of platforms with scores attached, because we have never seen one whose ordering was not explicable by commission rates. Comparative superlatives such as "best network", because they assert a controlled comparison we have not run. Content produced at scale to occupy keyword variations rather than to answer a question. Quotations attributed to people who did not say them.

Our commercial arrangements and their limits are also set out in the terms, and the background to how the site operates is on the about page.