Transparency report
How Mintmark makes money
You deserve to know how a publication that gives you money advice makes its own. No fine print here — the whole model, in the open.
The short version
Mintmark is a free, reader-funded publication in the original sense: we make money from attention (display advertising) and from recommendations (affiliate commissions), never from selling your data or charging you for content. If a company wants to influence what we write, the answer is no, in that tone of voice.
1. Display advertising
The boxes marked “Advertisement” across the site are served by ad networks (beginning with Google AdSense, and premium networks as readership grows). We earn a few cents to a few dollars per thousand views — the industry measure is called RPM, and it's honest work: our incentive is to publish things genuinely useful enough that you come back and tell people. We keep ads out of your way: none in the middle of sentences, none that chase you down the page, none disguised as articles.
2. Affiliate commissions
Some guides link to accounts, tools, or books we already intend to recommend on merit. If you open an account or buy through those links, the partner pays us a commission at no cost to you — your price, rate, and terms are identical either way. Two promises govern every such link:
- Selection happens before monetization. We choose what's best for the reader first, then check whether a partner program exists. If none does, the recommendation stays.
- No pay-to-play. Companies cannot buy inclusion, placement, ratings, or silence. Where a page contains affiliate links, it says so on the page.
3. What we never do
- Sell or rent your email address or personal data — our privacy policy spells this out legally.
- Publish sponsored content presented as editorial, accept guest posts for links, or sell follow links.
- Take positions in specific stocks or products we cover, or accept compensation from companies we review.
- Use your reading habits for anything beyond aggregate, anonymized analytics and ad measurement.
Why this model is good for you
The ad-plus-affiliate model means our revenue scales with trust, not with extraction. A guide only earns if it genuinely helps enough people that search engines rank it and readers stay. The moment we publish junk to chase clicks, the business dies — which is a pressure we consider healthy. It's the same flywheel we analyzed, somewhat meta, in how niche websites turn Google traffic into income — this site is that playbook, practiced in public.
Questions?
Ask us anything about the business model, suggest a correction, or hold us to this standard: contact the desk.