This page explains how Aquarium Answers is funded and what that means for the guides you read.
We would rather over-explain this than have you wonder. If a website recommends equipment and also earns money when you buy it, you are entitled to know about the arrangement before you take the advice — not after.
How This Site Is Funded
Aquarium Answers is being built as a long-term project, and the intention is to support it through advertising and carefully selected affiliate partnerships rather than by charging readers or putting guides behind a paywall.
This means some guides may contain affiliate links, and the site may display advertising supplied by third-party networks. Wherever that happens, the rules set out below apply.
What an Affiliate Link Is
An affiliate link is a link to a retailer that identifies us as the referrer. If you follow it and buy something, the retailer pays us a small commission out of their own margin.
It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the same as it would be if you had gone to the retailer directly. The commission comes out of the seller's side, not yours.
The Rules We Hold Ourselves To
These apply wherever an affiliate link or advertisement appears on this site.
Money does not buy a recommendation. No commission, ad spend or commercial relationship changes what a guide says. A product earns its place by being genuinely relevant and useful to readers — never because it pays better. This is part of our editorial policy, not a separate promise.
We will say when a product is not worth it. Including when the honest answer is that you do not need the product at all, that the cheaper option is fine, or that the equipment you already own will do the job. An affiliate link on a page never obliges us to end that page with "buy this."
Affiliate links will be disclosed on the page you are reading. Not only here. Any guide containing affiliate links will say so clearly on that guide itself.
Advertising will be visually distinct from our guides. Advertisements are supplied by third-party networks, and their presence is never an endorsement of the product, service or company advertised. We do not choose every ad individually, which is exactly why we will keep them visibly separate from our editorial content.
We will not fake urgency or scarcity. No countdown timers, no invented discounts, no pressure to buy today.
Your fish come first. If a recommendation would be good for our revenue and bad for the animals in your care, it does not get published.
Why We Take Money From Products At All
Researching a guide properly takes time, and keeping this site running costs money. Advertising and affiliate income are what will allow the guides to stay free, complete and available to everyone — including the beginner with a small tank and no budget, who often needs the information most.
The alternative models are worse for you. Paywalls put basic fish welfare information out of reach of the people most likely to need it. Sponsored posts sell the editorial itself. Affiliate income, handled honestly, is the model where our interests and yours stay closest to aligned: we only benefit if you find the recommendation useful enough to act on, and we only keep readers if the recommendations are worth acting on.
That alignment only holds if we are honest about it, which is why this page exists.
What We Do Not Do
- We do not sell sponsored articles or paid placements in our guides.
- We do not let a company review or approve our guides before publication.
- We do not accept payment in exchange for a positive verdict.
- We do not sell or rent your personal information. What we do collect is set out in our privacy policy.
Retailer Cookies
Where affiliate links exist, retailers typically use a cookie to recognise a referral. That is the retailer's system, on the retailer's site, under the retailer's privacy policy — not ours. We do not see your payment details, your card, or what else is in your basket. Our own use of cookies is described in our privacy policy.
Questions
If you ever want to know whether we have a commercial relationship with a product mentioned in a guide, just ask through our contact page and we will tell you straight.
This page sits alongside our editorial policy and our disclaimer, which together set out how our content is produced and what it can and cannot be relied on for.