Disclosures: how we make money

Some things we want to be very clear about.

How we make money (the short version)

Fathercraft runs on our own products (like Father’s Ed and the Sling), affiliate commissions, free review units, and a few paid brand partnerships, mostly on YouTube.

What money can’t buy here

No brand pays for a spot on any of our “best of” lists or for where it ranks. Mark and I pick, rank and rewrite those lists ourselves. Sponsors don’t see them early or get a say.

Our editorial standard

Our unbiased editorial standard is an incredibly important asset to us. So, we will never give a product a better review than we think it merits in order to try and increase our affiliate sales. We believe this is, first off, the right thing to do. As dads ourselves we hope everything we read is held to the same standard, and we don’t mess around when it comes to information about kids. Secondly, we hope to sell our own products to people who’ve found our website and read the free information we make publicly available. If we don’t build trust with the users of this site, that won’t work out too well. This is a more important goal than making money from affiliate sales, and we won’t compromise this trust to try and increase affiliate sales.

The revenue from affiliate sales and brand partnerships allows us to create more high-quality content and give it away for free. One of our goals is to create as much high-quality, research-backed information for parents as possible, and give it away for free. Affiliate revenue is a way for us to fund the creation of this content without making our readers pay for it.

Paid partnerships

Sometimes a brand pays us to make a video about its product or to put a sponsor read in one of our videos. When that happens, we say so at the top, every time. The brand can check our facts, but it can’t buy the verdict.

Free product

Brands often send us products to test. Getting one doesn’t guarantee a review, much less a good one.

Affiliate Links

We’re receiving paid compensation from the manufacturers of some of the products we discuss on this site, and from Amazon, via affiliate links.

What’s an affiliate link, how does this affect you, why does it matter, and what’s our policy on compensation and affiliate links?

An affiliate link is a type of link that allows a product manufacturer or Amazon to track what happens after a link is clicked, and where a visit to a website originated from, with a string of characters added to the end of the link.

It looks something like this:

rfsn=617330.8cc94&utm_source=refersion…

So that string allows a manufacturer to tell that a visit to their site comes from us. If a visitor to their site ends up purchasing, they compensate us.

How does this affect you? Clicking on an affiliate link does not change the price you’re charged for a product – there’s absolutely no cost to you. The manufacturer (or Amazon) covers our commission. When you click an affiliate link a “cookie” is used to track your visit. Cookies are used by most of the websites on the entire internet, and don’t pose privacy or security risks (we can’t tell anything about you as an individual, only broad metrics about how our links perform.)

Why is this important? First of all, we want to be transparent about the fact we’re receiving payment for affiliate link purchases by users of our website – we believe this is the right thing to do, and hope this transparency builds trust with you. Second, the FTC mandates use of affiliate link disclosures, so there’s that.

Also, affiliate links are important to us because they help us generate revenue that funds the business. We hope you’ll see them as a choice. If you found value in some information we provided, and are considering purchasing a product, if you click on an affiliate link and end up purchasing, you can help us out. If that doesn’t sit right with you, just don’t click the link – you can easily find the information we put in our links via a quick Google search, and we won’t be compensated that way.

Collection of data through affiliate links. Some affiliate marketing software may collect personal information when you interact with our digital property, including IP addresses, digital identifiers, information about your web browsing and app usage and how you interact with our properties and ads for a variety of purpose, such as personalization of offers or advertisements, analytics about how you engage with websites or ads, and other commercial purposes. For more information about the collection, use and sale of your personal data and your rights, please use this link and this link.

Amazon Affiliate Links (Amazon Associates)

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Questions?

Hopefully, this resonates with you and seems fair. If it doesn’t, we’d love to hear from you: hello@fathercraft.com

Thanks!