Money and editorial
Disclosures
How The Strange File is paid for, what that does and does not buy, and every commercial relationship currently in effect.
Current status: nothing is monetised
As of the date above, The Strange File has no active affiliate accounts, no sponsors, and no revenue. There are no tracking links anywhere on this site. The policy below is published in advance so that the rules are fixed before there is any money on the line to bend them.
No display advertising. Ever.
This site will not carry banner ads, programmatic ad slots, interstitials, pop-ups, or auto-playing video ads. This is a permanent commitment, not a launch-period concession.
The reason is partly aesthetic — an archive of carefully licensed photographs is precisely the kind of page programmatic advertising makes cheap — and partly structural. Ad revenue scales with impressions, which rewards volume and outrage. That incentive is directly opposed to a publication whose entire product is restraint.
What we may earn money from
- Affiliate commissions on items genuinely connected to a file — most often the book a story is actually documented in, an archive print, or a map.
- Direct affiliate programmes with retailers, on the same terms.
- Products of our own — books, maps, guides, and merchandise — clearly identified as ours.
- The Department of Questionable Purchases, a category that is openly and entirely commercial, and says so on the category page.
- Newsletter recommendations, disclosed inside the newsletter itself.
The Amazon disclosure
If and when an Amazon Associates account is active, this notice appears on every page that carries an Amazon link:
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Individual links additionally carry a near-link label — “paid link” or“commission earned” — placed before the link rather than in a footer, so the relationship is known before the click rather than after it.
The rules that protect the verdicts
- No commercial relationship has ever changed a verdict, and none ever will.If a sponsor’s interests touch a file’s subject, the sponsorship is declined — not the file.
- Products must be genuinely relevant to the file. No unrelated-product padding to fill a commission slot.
- We never claim to have tested something we have not. Where an item has not been personally used, the page says so in those words.
- We do not display prices. A stale price is a small lie that accumulates, and no reader benefits from a number that was true last quarter.
- We do not call anything “the best” without stating what the judgement is based on.
- No invented links. An affiliate URL is published only once a real programme account exists. Fabricating one would be inventing a commercial relationship, which is the same category of lie as inventing a source.
Humour is not a licence to overstate
The Department of Questionable Purchases is written to be funny. The line it does not cross is simple: humour may exaggerate the situation, never the product’s capabilities. “Authorised for branches that have mistaken patience for weakness” is a joke about the buyer. “Cuts through anything” would be a false claim about the tool, and that is a different thing entirely.
Sponsored content and gifts
None to date. If sponsored content is ever published it will be labelled as sponsored in the file itself and through each platform’s official paid-partnership control — not only in a caption. Gifted or review items are disclosed on the same terms, whether or not the sender asked for coverage.
AI disclosure
No AI-generated image is ever presented as a file’s documentary evidence. Where a generated illustration is used to depict something that could not be photographed, it is labelled as an illustration on the page and declared through each platform’s AI-content control. This applies even on platforms that do not currently require it.
Questions
Anything here, including a request to see how a specific file’s image licence was verified:thestrangefile@gmail.com.