Affiliate & sponsorship disclosure

Current status

There are currently no affiliate relationships, no sponsored posts, no paid product placements and no advertising slots on mariuszduda.md. Every link you find in an article today is an ordinary link, added because it is useful, and it earns nothing.

What may change, and how you will know

Independent editorial has to be funded somehow. In future this site may join retailer affiliate programmes — the likely candidates being general marketplaces and European instrument and audio retailers — or carry clearly marked sponsored content. If that happens, the following rules apply and are not negotiable:

• Clear and conspicuous labelling. A disclosure appears at the top of the article, before the content it applies to, in the same size and colour as the body text. Never in the footer, never in grey 10-pixel type, never below the fold.
• Per-link marking. Commercial links are labelled inline, so you can see which link earns money before you click it, not after.
• Sponsored content is labelled as advertising. Any piece paid for by a third party carries a banner reading “Sponsored” or “#ad” at the very top, is excluded from reviews and buying recommendations, and is written to a standard that makes the label unnecessary.
• No price change for you. Affiliate commission is paid by the retailer out of its margin. You never pay more for using a link from this site.
• This page updates first. The programme, the retailer and the date are listed here before the first commercial link goes live.

Review samples, loans and gifts

Where gear is tested, the article states how it was obtained. There are only four possibilities and each one is written out in full:

• Bought at retail — the default, and the strongest position to write from.
• Long-term loan — supplied by the manufacturer or distributor for testing and returned afterwards.
• Permanent sample — supplied and not collected. The article says so, every time.
• Reader or third-party unit — borrowed from someone who owns it, with the conditions described.

A loan buys consideration for coverage. It does not buy a favourable conclusion, an embargo-friendly framing, or the removal of a criticism. Manufacturers who ask for copy approval as a condition of a loan are declined, and the request itself is mentioned in the article.

What is never for sale

• Editorial verdicts, scores and recommendations.
• Inclusion in a buying guide or a “best of” list.
• The removal or softening of published criticism.
• Links inside editorial articles, whether described as guest posts, collaborations or link exchanges.
• Advance sight of an article by anyone with a commercial interest in it.

Requests to buy any of the above are declined, and repeat requests may be published in full.

How recommendations are chosen

Products are selected for coverage on relevance to readers, European availability and price, not on commission rate. Where two products are close, the cheaper or more widely available one wins the recommendation, and the article explains why. Where the honest answer is “keep what you have” or “buy nothing this year”, that is the answer given, even though it earns exactly nothing. The full methodology sits in the editorial policy.

Legal note

This disclosure is written to satisfy both the United States Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides — which require material connections to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously — and European consumer-protection rules on unfair commercial practices, including the requirement that advertising is identifiable as such. Where the two differ, the stricter one is applied.

Disclosure questions

Questions about a specific link

If a link on this site is not clearly labelled and you think it should be, that is a mistake worth reporting. Send the page URL to [email protected] and it will be corrected and noted on the page.