Affiliate Disclosure

Our Commitment to Transparency

Honest Ratings is funded primarily through affiliate commissions and display advertising, and we believe you deserve to know exactly how that works before you read a single review. This page explains, in plain terms, where our revenue comes from and — just as importantly — the steps we take to keep that revenue from influencing what we actually recommend.

We Are a Participant in the Amazon Associates Program

Honest Ratings Media is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. In practice, this means many of our review and buying-guide articles include links to product listings on Amazon, tagged with an Associates ID (for example, honestreviews-20). If you click one of those links and complete a qualifying purchase — of the reviewed product or, in some cases, anything else during that shopping session — we earn a small commission. This commission comes directly from Amazon's advertising budget, not from your pocket: it costs you nothing extra, and the price you pay is the same whether you use our link or navigate to Amazon directly.

How the Tracking Works

When you click an outbound Amazon link on this Site, Amazon places a short-lived tracking cookie in your browser that identifies the purchase as having come from our Associates account. That cookie generally has a window of about 24 hours, though Amazon's own terms govern the exact duration and conditions. We do not receive any personal information about you or your order through this process — only aggregated commission data showing that a sale was attributed to our account.

Commission Never Influences Our Scores

This is the part that matters most: our review scores, our "best pick" recommendations, and our editorial verdicts are determined entirely by hands-on testing, independent of whether a product has an affiliate program attached to it, and independent of how large the resulting commission would be. A product does not get a higher score, a better ranking in a comparison table, or a more favorable write-up because it pays a higher commission rate or because a manufacturer sent us a free unit. We test first and write our conclusions before affiliate links are added to an article, specifically to keep commission structure out of the evaluation process. Our full approach to testing is described in our Review Methodology and Editorial Policy.

Where You'll See These Disclosures

Every article on this Site that contains affiliate links carries a short disclosure near the top of the page, before any affiliate link appears, so you know the financial relationship before you start reading our conclusions. You'll also find a persistent link to this page in the site footer. We do not hide affiliate relationships inside fine print, and we do not use disguised or misleading link text to obscure that a link leads to a retailer we earn commission from.

Other Affiliate and Advertising Relationships

In addition to Amazon Associates, we may participate in affiliate programs with other retailers or manufacturers as the Site grows, and we display advertising through Google AdSense, which is a separate, unrelated revenue source based on ad impressions rather than product purchases. Any new affiliate relationship we enter into will be covered by this same disclosure and held to the same no-influence standard described above.

Identifying Affiliate Links

Affiliate links on this Site typically appear as "Buy on Amazon," "Check Price," or similar call-to-action buttons within a review, or inside price-comparison boxes near the top or bottom of an article. Not every outbound link on the Site is an affiliate link — links to manufacturer specification pages, other publications, or reference sources are not monetized.

Why We Chose This Model

We considered a few different ways to fund independent testing, including a paid membership model. We chose affiliate commissions and display advertising because they let every reader access the full review, free, without a paywall, while the cost of actually buying the products we test is covered by the same readers who benefit from that testing choosing to buy through our links, if they find it useful, at no added cost to themselves. If our recommendations stop being useful, there's no commission to earn, which we think is a reasonably healthy incentive structure.

Questions

If you have questions about our affiliate relationships or how a specific link on the Site is monetized, email us at amirchandler7@gmail.com.