Hard caps on placement density
One paid placement above the fold. That is the rule. Everything else flows from it.
- Broker review pages: maximum two paid placements total, maximum one above the fold.
- “Best of” listing pages: maximum three paid placements total, maximum one above the fold. The listing itself is editorial, not paid.
- Blog and editorial articles: maximum one paid placement per page, never above the first body paragraph.
- Homepage: maximum three paid placements total, maximum one above the fold.
- Methodology, editorial standards, about, contact, privacy, terms, cookies, risk-disclosure pages: zero paid placements. Ever. No exceptions.
What we will not sell
Several practices are common across affiliate-comparison sites in finance. We do not do them. No paying partner has asked us to make an exception, and we would refuse if they did.
- No ranking influence. Editorial rankings are produced from the methodology at /methodology. A broker cannot pay to move up the rankings, to be included in a “best of” list, or to have a competitor moved down.
- No fact removal. Negative findings — regulatory actions, withdrawal complaints, spread degradation, compliance breaches — are not removed regardless of partnership status.
- No in-content paid injection. No paid text or links inside editorial body copy. No paid links inside broker-data tables. No paid content disguised as editorial.
- No interstitial takeovers. No modal pop-ups carrying paid content. No exit-intent overlays. No full-screen takeovers on any page.
- No advertorial-as-editorial.Sponsored content carries a permanent “Sponsored” full-width bar (not a small chip), is bylined separately from editorial coverage, and is filed under /sponsored-content/ rather than under regular editorial sections.
- No purchased reviews.Brokers cannot commission a review of themselves. Sponsored Insight is an editorial-format article authored against a partner's brief; the byline reflects that.
What we will sell
Paid placements live in clearly-marked containers, structurally separate from editorial. A partner buys real estate and intent, not ranking influence.
- Featured Broker: exclusive monthly placement at a dedicated /brokers/featured/ slot plus a homepage rail. Never inside an editorial ranking table.
- Premium Card:slots in a clearly-labelled “Partner Brokers” carousel. Never woven into an editorial top-10 list.
- Top-Strip Banner: sitewide CPM rotation on homepage + listing-page banner zones. Not on editorial standards / about / contact / methodology pages.
- Logo Bar Slot:12-slot “Reviewed Brokers” trust strip in homepage hero band and footer site-wide.
- Sponsored Insight: editorial-format article filed under /sponsored-content/, permanent Sponsored bar, indexed for SEO, broker reuse rights granted.
- Press Release: formatted broker announcement filed under /sponsored-content/press/, eligible for Google News where applicable.
How we disclose
Every paid placement carries a visible “Sponsored” full-width bar in a distinct colour, never a grey chip. Singapore-resident visitors see a longer-form disclosure sentence per MAS Notice SFA 04-N12 advertising rules. Per-jurisdiction risk warnings render verbatim from the broker partnership-team-approved wording — not paraphrased.
Sponsorship payments are disclosed at the platform level (this page) and at the placement level (the Sponsored bar on every paid unit). Aggregate sponsorship revenue is reportable on request to a broker compliance team auditing our editorial-independence representations.
Enforcement
These caps are enforced operationally, not just stated as policy. A pre-deploy build gate counts paid-placement components on every changed page; any page that exceeds the cap above fails CI and cannot ship. A nightly drift crawler walks every live page and counts rendered placements, catching partner-injected scripts and CMS edits that bypass git. Any drift triggers a same-day alert and pull-request block.
A documented waiver process exists for legitimate exceptions (signed commit message format BRAND-WAIVER: <reason>), logged in a public changelog at /editorial-standards/changelog. The crawler refuses the waiver; only the editor can override.