Considering how widespread the practice of paying review websites to get featured on top is, I was wondering whether Privacy Guides has ever received proposals to promote specific products/services on the website in exchange for money or affiliate links stuff.
If so, can those companies be mentioned in some kind of wall of shame?
Are there maybe some other projects dedicated to exposing such companies, where trustworthy review sites can submit the requests they receive, maybe anonymously, to expose companies that do this?
Obviously the answer to your bigger/overall question is yes since @Niek-de-Wilde has a template, but to elaborate on this one…
The reason we don’t do this is mainly because the bulk of these messages are from random companies/startups you haven’t heard of in the first place, and probably never will. A lot of fly by night VPN operations for example which will probably not even be around in a few months.
Very rarely a more prominent company will point out to us that they have an affiliate program and inquire about whether we’re interested in joining. We kindly direct them to Donation Acceptance Policy - Privacy Guides and that’s usually the end of the conversation.
Affiliate programs are unfortunately pretty industry standard and generally publicized by the service themselves, so you can easily check whether your favorite site does them. We don’t need to make a list of the services that have them, and the existence of such a list would probably cause more confusion. We’d prefer to just focus on the product itself in this case.
To my knowledge, we’ve never received any shadier offers than that from any companies anyone would care about.[1] If we did, we would likely report about it somewhere (this may be why we don’t get shady offers in the first place lol) if we thought people would find the revelation notable.
