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How We Make Money

TL;DR: We make money via affiliate links, which means if you click a link on our site, we may earn a commission. Any commissions we receive do not affect our recommendations, but if you want to know more about how that works, read on …

Who We Are

Greetings, internet person! We’re thrilled you’ve found your way to Reviews.com. That you’re reading this page tells us we’re going to like each other (a lot). After all, who doesn’t like someone else doing their hard work for them? We want you to feel confident using Reviews.com as a trusted source of information to assist with your purchasing decisions, so let’s get you up to speed on how and why we do our thing.

Our Motive

At Reviews.com, we believe people deserve the power to be well-informed when making difficult and complex purchases, and that’s what drives us. We’re not the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people; we’re the “here’s the deal” people. Everything we do is about simplifying your life by making buying decisions smarter, easier, and more empowering. We’re pretty obsessive about it, and we’re proud of that.

Our Investigative Process

Here at Reviews.com we have an editorial staff of writers and editors who are separate and independent from our business team. The editorial staff figures out what services to review based on what’s trending and what we think readers are most interested in and best served by. When it comes to the review process itself, we go all out. We’ll often subscribe to and pay for services that we review ourselves, because we believe it’s important we experience things from the same perspective as any other consumer. Where it would be unfeasible to pay for a service in order to try and assess it, we pull out all the stops doing research on the subject. We spend dozens of hours researching what we’re reviewing and how it’s supposed to fit into our lives. We talk to experts, we talk to (and sometimes question) each other. Things get pretty serious, but the end result is always something we’re proud of sharing.

How Our Business Works

We believe our work should be free and accessible to consumers everywhere. At the same time, the work we do is time-intensive and expensive. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to locate the proverbial money tree (the search continues).

In the same way we prioritize transparency in our reviews, we want you to know a bit more about how we make money. There is no advertising on our site: No display advertising, no programmatic advertising, no Google DoubleClick or Facebook Pixel to track how our users are engaging with us. Traditional advertising is fine for others, but not for us.

SO HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY? After our independent editorial team completes a review, our business team sees if the folks selling the actual service are willing to pay us a slice of the revenue or other compensation when readers click on a link and transact. Some sellers of reviewed items will choose not to pay us for these clicks, and their decision has zero impact on our recommendations to you. Some sellers of a service we’ve reviewed choose to pay us if you click on it, and that also has zero impact on our recommendations to you. We believe in publishing content that has integrity. If that means we have to leave money on the table in the name of integrity, we are proud to make that decision.

What If We Do a Review We Can’t Make Money From?

So what if we have benefited in the past from a relationship with a business that didn’t make the cut in an updated review? Say that business reached out to us in an attempt to change our mind or get their service included in some way. We would listen to what they have to say and give it all due consideration. But at the end of the day, whatever we do (or don’t do) will be driven by independent editorial consideration of where such a service stacks up against the others we evaluated.

Or what if we did a review in which our top picks resulted in no ways to make money? Oh, well. If they are the best then they are the best, regardless of whether or not we’ll make money from a review. The point is the work we do is all about you — our reader, the consumer. We believe if we keep our focus in the right place, the opportunity to be a successful business will follow. It will never be the other way around.

That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.