Where the money comes from
Disclosure
This site audits other people's conflicts of interest, so it had better be plain about its own.
What this site earns from
Guest placements and sponsored placements. A company pays to publish a piece on The desk that publishes these pages, or to have an existing piece carry a link, and the terms are on the placement page.
At the time of writing that is the whole of it. If another revenue line is added, this page changes before the revenue starts rather than after.
- A placement is a piece of writing, published under the name of whoever wrote it, that a company paid to have appear here.
- It is not a review, it is not a comparison row, and it does not change anything on a page it is not part of.
What it does not earn from
The absences matter more than the presences in this category, because they are the ones a reader cannot verify from the outside.
- No affiliate commission on any tool named on this site. Not on HeyGen, not on Synthesia, not on D-ID, and not on anything mentioned in passing.
- No vendor pays for a position in a comparison, a price table or a review.
- No payment for a rating, which is straightforward here because this site does not publish ratings.
Several of the pages that compete with this site's comparisons do earn affiliate commission, and some of them disclose it properly. Disclosure is the honest version of that arrangement, and it is a different arrangement from this one.
Why that distinction matters here
This site publishes an audit of who owns the pages ranking for its own target terms. On one of them, nine results contained no independent publisher at all.
- Naming a competitor's ownership is a fact, not an accusation.
- Being paid by someone does not make a page wrong. It makes it unverifiable, which is a different and more manageable problem.
A page that names other people's conflicts while hiding its own would be worse than the pages it audits, because it would be borrowing their credibility problem and adding a lie to it. Hence this page, linked from every comparison that does the auditing.
What a payment cannot buy
Three things, and they are the three that would make the rest of the site worthless if they were for sale.
- A place in a comparison table, or a better row in one.
- The removal of an unflattering fact, including a price that has gone up.
- An undisclosed link, in any piece, under any arrangement.
What is not on this list, and why
Display advertising, lead sales and data licensing are all normal ways for a site like this to make money, and none of them is happening here.
That is worth saying because their absence is easy to assume and impossible to verify from the outside. If any of them starts, this page says so before it starts, and the modification date on it changes.
How a paid piece is marked
On the page itself, in the piece rather than in a footer, and with the link attribute the agreement requires. A reader should never have to work out whether they are reading a placement.
A paid piece is still held to the standard in the editorial policy: sourced figures, named judgements and printed arithmetic. Being paid for is not a reason to publish something that would otherwise fail those tests.
Why this page is short
A disclosure that needs a long explanation is usually explaining something away. This one is two lists and a rule, and it should stay that way.
If it ever needs a third list, that is a signal worth acting on rather than writing around.
- The about page covers what the desk is and what it is entitled to claim.
- The editorial policy covers what it will and will not publish, and what happens when a page turns out to be wrong.
Between the three, everything about how this site operates is written down in about fifteen hundred words, which is roughly half the length of one of its pricing pages. That ratio is deliberate: the interesting work is in the arithmetic, not in the promises about it.
Nothing here is a legal notice and none of it is drafted to be one. It is a plain account of where the money comes from, written so that a reader can decide how much weight to give everything else on the site.
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Every figure on this site carries the page it was read from and the date it was read.
See the pricing deskBy the Humva Desk. Checked against primary sources and updated .