Editorial policy

Last updated: 31 July 2026

This page sets out how I research, verify, correct and fund the material on this site. It exists because the adult advertising category has a specific and documented reliability problem — deposit figures propagate between affiliate blogs until the original number is unrecognisable — and the only useful answer is a method a reader can check. Everything below is a rule I actually follow, not an aspiration. Where a rule costs me something, that cost is stated.

Source hierarchy

I rank sources, and the ranking decides what may enter a comparison table. Primary documentation sits at the top: a network's own advertiser payments page, help-centre article, terms of service, or the equivalent published policy. Regulator filings and court opinions occupy the same tier for legal material — the age-verification section of this site cites the Supreme Court opinion and official trackers, not news summaries of them.

Direct observation of a platform's public pages ranks second. What a network's homepage claims is evidence of what it advertises, which is not always the same as what its documentation commits to. Where the two diverge, both appear and the divergence is the point.

Documented user reports on independent platforms rank third and are used only as reports, with attribution. A complaint on Affpaying or Trustpilot tells you what one person experienced; it is presented that way, never restated as an established fact about the network.

Competitor reviews and affiliate listicles are not a source. I read them to see what the market already covers and where the gaps are, and I take no figures from them. A number that exists only in another review does not exist for my purposes. This is the rule that removes most of the available material about this category, and it is the reason the site is small.

How a figure gets verified

I trace every number in the Adult Web Traffic comparison to a document, and publish the date I verified it. I check by opening the source, not by recalling it: platform terms change without announcement, and a figure that was accurate at the last check is an assumption until it is looked at again.

Where sources conflict, I publish the conflict rather than resolve it by preference. Reported minimum deposits for a single network range across an order of magnitude in third-party listings because different writers funded through different payment rails. The honest presentation is the range with the reason attached, not the most convenient point in it.

Where a platform publishes nothing, the page says the platform publishes nothing. Two of the networks compared here state no entry figure anywhere public, and both are quoted with precise numbers elsewhere online. An empty cell with an explanation is more useful than a confident invention, and I accept that it makes the table look less complete.

Where the strongest evidence would come from a live campaign I have not run, the page says so instead of implying I ran one. Documentation-based research has a ceiling, and pretending otherwise is the failure mode this site was built against.

Independence from commercial relationships

This site is funded by affiliate commissions. A reader who opens an account with a network through a link here may generate a commission for me at no additional cost to them. That is the whole model: there is no paid placement, no sponsored comparison, no arrangement under which a network purchases a position, an omission or a tone.

I make editorial decisions before commercial ones and do not revisit them afterwards. What appears in a comparison table, in what order, with which columns, and with which limitations named, is decided by the research. A network I earn from is described with its weaknesses stated as plainly as anyone else's — the featured network in my main comparison carries a full column of limitations covering weak automated optimisation, payout terms slower than competitors, and pricing data that is visible only after login.

I decline several categories of request as a matter of policy: removing accurate information, changing the order of a table, softening a stated limitation, adding a guest post, or inserting links into existing pages. Where a partnership is conditional on any of these, I do not take it.

The funding model is set out on this page and in about, and what those links mean for reader data is covered in the privacy policy. A reader should never have to guess whether a link is commercial, which is why the arrangement is stated in plain terms rather than buried in a disclaimer.

What I deliberately do not do

I publish no scores, ratings or rankings. A composite number out of ten implies a measurement that was never performed and buries the disagreements that actually matter to a buyer. Comparison tables here carry factual columns — launch year, minimum deposit, pricing models, formats, inventory type — and leave the weighing to the reader, who knows their own campaign.

I do not use the vocabulary of the category's worst content. No "best", no "ultimate", no "top" rankings assembled from commission rates. Where one network genuinely has the lowest published entry figure in a table, that is stated as a fact about a number, not as a verdict.

I do not publish anything that could be mistaken for legal advice. The regulatory material describes primary sources and their dates. Compliance decisions about a specific offer in a specific jurisdiction require a lawyer.

Corrections

I correct errors in place and update the page's verification date when I do. Substantive corrections are noted in the text rather than silently overwritten, because a reader who acted on the earlier version deserves to know it changed.

Reports go to [email protected]. A useful report includes the page, the figure in question and a link to the source showing the correct information. I act quickly on reports backed by primary documentation; a report asserting a different number without a source gets checked against the platform's own pages before anything moves.

I do not remove pages quietly. If I withdraw material because it can no longer be verified, I say so rather than disappear it.

Scheduled review

I recheck comparison pages on a schedule and whenever a triggering event occurs: a platform changing its payment terms, a new state age-verification statute taking effect, a network adding or dropping an ad format, or a regulator publishing new measurements. The age-verification material moves fastest and I treat it as the shortest-lived section on the site.

Every page carries the date I last checked its sources. If that date is old, treat the figures accordingly — and tell me, because a stale date is itself a defect worth reporting.

Authorship

Every page is signed by a named person with a public professional profile. I publish no anonymous comparisons and credit nothing to a house byline. The research and text are mine — I am Smith Jones, Performance Media Analyst — and my author page sets out my background, areas of expertise and an explicit account of what I have not personally tested.

Questions about this policy, or about how I arrived at a specific figure, go to [email protected]. Other routes are listed on the contact page.