Advertising and commercial content

InAutoNews is a commercial publication and expects to carry advertising. Somebody has to pay for the reporting, and we would rather it was advertisers than that we quietly took money to write things and hoped nobody noticed.

This page says how it works. The part that matters most is the labelling, so it has its own section and it is specific.

Editorial independence

Advertisers do not see articles before publication. They do not choose what we cover, they are not told in advance what is coming, and they cannot have a piece changed, softened or taken down because they dislike it. Buying space here buys space.

Nobody on the commercial side has access to publish, edit or delay an article. An advertiser who withdraws spend over a story is free to do so, and doing so does not get the story changed.

We will write critically about companies that advertise with us. If that is a problem, this is the wrong publication to buy space in, and it is better for everyone to establish that at the start.

What we sell

• Display advertising. Ordinary ad slots in fixed positions, sold by us or served through a network.
• Sponsored articles. A piece an advertiser has paid to have published, whether they wrote it or we did. Labelled as such above the text and excluded from the news feed and the news sitemap.
• Partner content. Material supplied by a commercial partner and published under the same rules as a sponsored article.
• Newsletter placements. Clearly marked, in the same way and for the same reasons.

What we do not sell: coverage, a favourable angle, a link inside an editorial article, a position in a comparison, or the removal of something already published.

How commercial content is labelled

Where an article is paid for, supplied by a commercial partner, or produced under any arrangement that would give a reasonable reader pause, it says so above the article, before the first word of the text. Not in a footnote. Not in grey type at the end. Not in a word like featured that was chosen because it means nothing.

The label names the advertiser. Disclosure without a name admits money was involved while withholding the one fact that lets a reader weigh it, and our system refuses to publish a sponsored article that has no sponsor recorded against it.

Sponsored pieces are visually distinct from editorial ones, carry no editorial byline implying we reported them, and are excluded from the news sitemap. A disclosure at the foot of a sponsored article is something a reader reaches after they have already read it, which is a receipt rather than a disclosure.

Link attributes

Paid and affiliate links carry rel="sponsored". Links we have not editorially chosen carry rel="nofollow". Editorial links, the ones we included because the source is worth reading, carry neither, because they are genuine recommendations.

This is not housekeeping. Selling links that pass ranking signals without disclosure is the specific practice that gets a publication's search visibility removed, and it is also a lie to the reader about why a link is there. We would rather not do it for the second reason.

Affiliate links

Some links may earn us a commission if you buy something after following them. Where an article contains one, the article says so, and the link is marked.

A commission never determines whether something is recommended, never determines the order of a list, and never determines which product gets covered. We do not publish buying guides assembled from whichever retailer pays most, and we do not write a product roundup because an affiliate programme suggested the topic.

The price you pay is not affected by using one of our links.

What we will not do

• Disguise advertising as independent editorial.
• Sell a link inside an article without disclosing it.
• Take payment to remove or amend a published article.
• Accept an advertorial that makes claims we would not print ourselves.
• Carry advertising on an article about a fatality, a serious injury or a criminal proceeding.
• Run advertising in a way that covers or interrupts the article you came to read.

We also turn down categories rather than judging them case by case: gambling, payday and high cost short term credit, and anything selling a device or service whose purpose is to defeat vehicle safety or emissions equipment.

What advertising will never do to the page

Where advertising appears, its space is reserved before it loads, so an advert arriving late cannot shift the paragraph you are reading. There are no pop ups over the article, no interstitial you have to dismiss before reading, and no automatically playing audio.

There is a limit to how much advertising a page carries, and the article always starts above it. A page where you scroll past three units before reaching a sentence is a page we have failed to make.

Advertising and your data

This site currently sets no advertising cookies and shares nothing with an advertising network. No profile of you is built here and no audience segment is sold.

If that changes, the cookies page will say so before it happens, you will be asked to choose, and refusing will be exactly as easy as accepting. Advertisers get audience numbers and nothing that identifies a reader.

Cars, travel and hospitality

Where a manufacturer has paid for travel or accommodation to an event, the article that results says so, at the top, in the same place a sponsorship label would go. Where a vehicle has been lent to us, the piece says who lent it and for how long.

Staff do not keep gifts of any value from companies they cover. Anything that turns up unsolicited is returned or given away, and no coverage follows from it.

Enquiries

Advertising enquiries go through the contact page, choosing advertising as the subject. Tell us what you want to run, in what format and over what period, and we will tell you whether we can and what it costs.

Please do not send press releases there expecting coverage in exchange for spend. The answer is no, and saying so here saves us both the exchange.

Complaints

If you think an advert here is misleading, offensive or badly placed, tell us and we will look at it. If you think something on this site is commercial content that was not labelled as such, tell us urgently, because that would be the most serious failure described on this page.

Advertising in the UK is also subject to the Advertising Standards Authority's codes, and you can complain to it directly about an advert regardless of what we say.