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How Jolt Journal Is Funded

The Jolt Journal is free to read. This page sets out every way we earn money, and the rules that keep that money away from what we write.

Where our money comes from

Display advertising

Ads on our pages are served by Google AdSense. Admiral, the service we use to deal with ad blockers, can also request ads from its own partners, such as Amazon’s ad service. These services choose which ads appear; we do not pick individual advertisers, and advertisers never see a story before it is published. Every ad box we place is marked “Advertisement”. Google can also place some ads on its own, such as a strip along the bottom of the screen; those sit outside our boxes and are placed by Google.

Some links to shops and services earn us a small commission if you buy something after clicking. It costs you nothing extra. These links come from Skimlinks, which turns some ordinary shop links in a story into affiliate links, and from retailer and partner programs we join directly. A story that may earn us money this way says so.

Links to government agencies, regulators and major news organisations, and to every site listed in a story’s Sources box, are excluded from Skimlinks, so they are never turned into affiliate links. Some older stories, written before we added Sources boxes, cite company or news pages that Skimlinks can turn into an affiliate link when the site is a shop in its network; those stories show our commission notice at the top.

What money never decides

  • Money never decides what we cover, what we say about it, or which products we recommend.
  • We never rank products by the commission they might earn us. Picks are based on what each product costs and offers, checked at the source.
  • Advertisers, affiliate networks and partners do not see stories before we publish them.

If we ever publish a story that someone has paid for, it will be clearly labelled “Sponsored” or “Partner content” at the top of the story and wherever it appears on the site, and it will name who paid. Paid links inside it are marked as paid for search engines. Sponsored stories are kept separate from our own reporting and never presented as our editorial judgment.

Who runs The Jolt Journal

The Jolt Journal was founded by Hamza Khalid, its Editor-in-Chief. Read our Ethics & Independence standards for the rules our journalism follows, and our About page for who we are.

Questions

If you have a question about how The Jolt Journal is funded, ask us through our contact page.