What pays for this site

1

The arrangement, without the euphemisms

Nobody pays to read this. The bills are met out of commercial agreements with gambling companies, under which a sum reaches this publisher when a reader crosses from here to one of them and registers. Some agreements pay a flat sum for a registration, some pay a share of what that account goes on to lose, and some pay on a mixture of the two. The size of a payment is commercially confidential and this publisher is not in a position to publish a schedule of it.

What is sayable is the shape, and the shape is the thing that matters to somebody reading a figure. Money arrives when a reader acts. No money arrives when a reader reads a count, decides the sequence is too long, and shuts the tab. A publication funded that way has an obvious incentive, and the honest thing to do with an obvious incentive is to print it at the top of the page that discusses it rather than in a line of small type at the bottom.

2

Four things the money does not buy

A step count. The number of separate things standing between a promise and spendable money is a question about published wording, and the answer comes out the same whoever is paying. A business cannot buy a row off a sheet, and a business that publishes more conditions than its neighbour gets a longer sequence printed against it for that reason alone.

A finding. Each guide names the first thing in its sequence that somebody other than the reader decides, with the sum still waiting at that point. That position falls where the published terms put it, and no agreement moves it up or down.

An assumption. Two numbers do most of the arithmetic on this domain, ten pence against one round and ninety-six per cent against a reel, and both are this publisher’s declarations rather than anybody’s published figures. They are the same two numbers on every guide, so no page can be quietly sweetened by nudging one of them, and the whole argument for them is on the method page.

A silence. Where a condition plainly has to be met and the published record is empty behind it, the page reports the gap. That is the least flattering sentence available about an offer and it is written wherever it is true.

3

The conflict, admitted rather than denied

Put the last two parts together and the tension is plain enough. This publisher is paid when a reader goes, and spends its pages explaining what a reader stands to lose between going and being paid. Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and no disclosure dissolves them.

Three things keep the method from bending. The arithmetic is reproducible: every money figure on the domain follows from the two declared numbers and one expression, so a reader who suspects a figure has been flattered can rebuild it in a minute and say so. The counting rules are published rather than private, which is what the method page is for. And nothing here is written as a recommendation: there is no verdict, no score and no ranking by merit anywhere in the prose, because a count of obstacles is a measurement and choosing for somebody else is not.

What that leaves is a reader who can check the work. It is a weaker guarantee than independence and it is the one actually on offer, so it is stated as what it is.

4

Nothing published obliges a page like this to tell you

It is worth being clear that this page is not here because a regulator demanded it. The British regulator’s own advertising guidance says nothing about publications of this sort: third parties come up only in its digital advertising section, where a licensee is told to take reasonable steps to see that whoever it contracts with keeps off websites infringing copyright, and no affiliate advertising rules beyond that have been published at all off the rule sheet, claim 82. Any page claiming a published duty wider than that would be inventing one.

So the disclosure above is voluntary, which is exactly why it is specific. A voluntary statement that said only that this site may receive compensation would be worth nothing to a reader trying to decide how much weight a figure carries. What is worth something is knowing which way the money runs, when it moves, and which parts of the work it is not allowed near.

5

The advertising rule that does bite, and the answer to it

The advertising code does reach promotional material, and two of its provisions sit squarely across the subject of this domain. The code’s demand on a promotion is prominence: where an omission would be likely to mislead, a significant condition kept out of the advertisement breaches it off the rule sheet, claim 61. The second provision goes to the word that gives these search phrases their pull. Calling a thing free is a description the advertising regulator has already qualified: it does not hold where a customer has to stake funds of their own before the offer becomes available, and a closely related formulation is to be avoided unless the customer stands to lose nothing of their own off the rule sheet, claim 60.

This publication is not the advertiser and does not run the promotions. What it can do about that rule is the only useful thing available to it, which is to count the significant conditions instead of summarising them away. A sequence printed row by row, with the money that is still standing beside each row, is a slower read than a headline and it is the version in which a condition cannot hide.

Two smaller refusals belong here as well. No bonus code is printed on this domain as though it were current, codes being the shortest-lived thing in this trade. And no payout speed is attributed to a named company, because this publisher has no sourced figure for one and will not estimate.