Advertising
One space, on a quiet site
Three surfaces carry advertising. Each carries exactly one placement at a time, and there is none anywhere else. That is not restraint we are being modest about — it is the whole of what is for sale. An advertisement is worth something on a page people believe, and the moment there are nine of them nobody believes the page and nobody wants the ninth.
What you cannot buy
It is never near a rating
A placement cannot appear on a verification page, in a report, in the reviewer queue, or anywhere behind a customer’s sign-in. Those surfaces are not on the list this feature can even hold — an advertisement standing beside the evidence it paid to be near is not repaired by a label, and the label makes it worse by proving somebody thought about it.
It cannot move a score or a listing
The scoring code receives a data structure with no field for advertising, and a test in our build pipeline constructs a maximally-paying customer and a free one with identical applications and asserts their scores are identical. The directory is ordered by the rubric; the placement sits outside that list and below the explanation of how the list is ordered.
If you are listed in the directory, your directory placement is withheld
Not moved, not re-labelled — withheld, and you are not charged for it. A company listed in the directory that has also bought the space beneath it has, to any reader, bought its way up the page. Being able to say we did not mean it that way is not the same as it not being that.
A person approves it before it appears
The same gate an assessment passes, and the database refuses to make one live without a recorded human review. We turn things down. What is being sold is a position beside our own credibility, and the day that stops being worth protecting is the day the space stops being worth buying.
It says what it is in its first two words
Every placement is headed “Paid placement”, with a sentence underneath saying it is an advertisement, that it is not an assessment, and that it affects nothing on the site. Not “sponsored”, not “partner”, not “featured”: every softer word is one somebody chose because it reads less like an advertisement.
Where it appears, and what it costs
| Placement | Per 30 days |
|---|---|
| The directory, below the listing | US$1,500 |
| What happens to your app, at the foot | US$750 |
| The published rubric, at the foot | US$750 |
Sold in periods of up to twelve months. A placement is a headline, a sentence and a link — no images, no scripts, nothing that follows anybody around. The limits are enforced by the database rather than by a specification, so a longer one cannot be sold by accident.
The surfaces that will never carry one
/a/[slug]The verification page. Somebody arrives here having clicked a trust mark to find out whether it means anything. An advertisement beside that answer is a stranger paying to stand next to our evidence.
/console/reports/[assessmentId]The report. It is the thing the customer paid for and the record we would produce in a dispute; nothing in it is for sale.
/verifyThe signature check. Its entire value is that it is mechanical and disinterested.
/reviewThe reviewer queue. A reviewer deciding whether to certify an application must not be looking at anything anybody paid to put there.
/consoleThe customer’s own workspace. They are paying us; selling their attention on to somebody else is the arrangement this company exists to be the opposite of.
Asking for one
There is no checkout for this. You write to us, a person reads it, and we say yes or no — which is slower than a payment form and is the point: a placement nobody looked at is the exact failure this company cannot have. Tell us which surface, for how long, and what you want it to say.
