Creator Gear earns affiliate commission. When you follow certain links on this site and go on to buy something, the retailer pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay the same price you would have paid anyway.
That is the entire commercial model. We do not run display advertising, we do not sell sponsored posts, and no brand has ever paid to appear in a guide, to be ranked higher, or to be described more favourably. There is no rate card, because there is nothing for sale.
The rule this whole site runs on
Recommendations are decided before anyone looks at whether a commission exists. If a recommendation only makes sense commercially, it does not get published.
An affiliate link is an ordinary link with a tracking identifier attached. When you click it, the retailer’s affiliate network records that the visit originated from Creator Gear. If you buy something within a certain window — which varies by programme and is often short — the retailer pays us a percentage of the sale value.
You pay nothing extra. Commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your pocket. The price is identical whether you use our link or not. We do not see your purchase. We receive aggregate reporting from the network, not your name, your payment details or your account. Not every link earns. Many products and retailers we recommend have no affiliate programme at all, and we recommend them anyway when they are the right answer.
Affiliate income only corrupts advice if commercial information reaches the editorial decision. Ours is kept out of it, in four specific ways.
One. Recommendations come first. What to recommend, and in what order, is decided on the merits before commission rates are considered. Whether a commission exists does not enter the discussion.
Two. Rate does not affect ranking. A product paying a higher percentage is not placed above one paying nothing, or one paying less. Ordering is editorial.
Three. We recommend against buying, regularly. A significant amount of what we publish tells readers their existing equipment is sufficient, or that they should wait, or that a cheaper option is genuinely better. That advice earns us nothing and stays in.
Four. No brand has editorial input. Manufacturers do not see guides before publication, do not approve wording, and have no route to influence content.
Creator Gear participates in affiliate programmes operated by retailers and affiliate networks covering photography, video, audio and consumer electronics. Where a specific programme requires particular disclosure wording, that wording appears on the relevant page in addition to this policy.
If you would like to know which programme a specific link belongs to, ask us and we will tell you. We have no reason to be coy about it, and the answer to that question should never be hard to get.
Accept payment for coverage, for a ranking position, or for favourable framing. Publish sponsored content presented as independent editorial — if we ever publish something a brand has paid for, it will be labelled unambiguously at the top of the page. Sell link insertions into existing articles, however the request is framed. Claim to have tested equipment we have not used. Publish prices or specifications we cannot verify, or invent figures to complete a table. Or use artificial urgency — limited time, best price guaranteed, cheapest online — to push a purchase.
How affiliate links are labelled
A disclosure appears in the footer of every page, and a further disclosure appears within guides that contain affiliate links, close to where those links sit. We do not hide the disclosure at the bottom of a long page and consider the job done.
Where a link is not an affiliate link, we do not pretend otherwise, and we do not add tracking to links purely to create the appearance of commercial relationships we do not have.
If you would rather not contribute
Entirely reasonable, and we would rather you used the research either way. You have three straightforward options: search for the product yourself rather than following our link; block third-party cookies in your browser, which prevents affiliate attribution — see our
cookie policy; or buy from a local shop, which we would encourage more often than you might expect from a site funded this way.
None of these limit what you can read here. There is no paywall, no login, and no content reserved for people who click the links.
Every funding model distorts something. Display advertising rewards page views, which rewards padding and clickbait. Sponsorship rewards keeping brands happy. Subscriptions restrict who can read the advice, which is a poor fit for a site whose whole purpose is helping people avoid expensive mistakes.
Affiliate income has its own distortion — it rewards recommending purchases — and we manage that by publishing a great deal of advice not to buy things. It is not a perfect model. It is the one we think does least damage to the reader, and we would rather explain our reasoning than pretend the tension does not exist.
If you think a recommendation on this site has been influenced by commercial considerations, tell us. That is the most serious complaint anyone can make about a publication like this one, and we will take it seriously. Email
hello@creatorgearinsider.com or use the
contact form.