How this site is paid, what that buys, and the figure nobody can look up

1

The arrangement, stated before anything else

This publisher is paid commission by the operators whose offers appear on the domain. That is a conflict of interest and not a disclosure formality, and it runs in one direction: money arrives when a reader leaves a page here, opens an account somewhere else and funds it. Nothing arrives when a reader reads the arithmetic, decides the subtraction is unattractive and closes the tab, which is the outcome a good many pages here point towards.

Two shapes of arrangement are usual at this end of the market. A share of what the operator keeps from a converted reader, paid for as long as the account lasts, or a single payment per converted reader paid once. The first makes a publisher interested in somebody who keeps playing. The second makes it indifferent to everything after the payment screen. At the moment that decides the money, which is the click, the two push in exactly the same direction.

2

What the arrangement actually pays for

This is the part almost no page of this sort writes down. The commission does not follow accuracy, care, or a correct multiple. It follows a reader who signs up and plays. So the arrangement pays more for whichever kind of offer converts best, and the kind that converts best is not the kind with the smallest condition attached to it. The biggest headline converts. The lowest barrier at sign-up converts. A sum of money converts better than a count of presses, because a sum reads as a sum. None of those is the same quality as a low multiple or a reachable set of terms.

Put plainly: an honest page and a profitable page are different objects, and where they disagree the arrangement has no opinion in favour of the honest one. Saying so is not a solution. It is the condition any reader should hold this publisher to while reading anything else on the domain.

3

One conversion, priced from both ends

Every figure in this part is this page’s own assumption, and each is named as it is used. Assume a reader’s first payment is £20.00. Assume the house forty times condition applies to it. Assume this publisher’s share is 35 per cent of what the operator expects to keep. Assume the 96 in the hundred the domain works to throughout.

Forty lots of £20.00 puts £800.00 across the reels. The margin’s four pence in each of those pounds comes to £32.00, which is the sum the operator expects to be left holding at the end of it. Thirty-five per cent of £32.00 is £11.20, the assumed worth of one conversion to this publisher. The reader’s own position on the same money runs the other way: a coefficient of minus 0.6 against £20.00, an expected close of minus £12.00, which means the payment is expected to be gone and a further £12.00 to have followed it out of a bank account.

One conversion as this publisher’s assumed share £11.20 The same conversion as the reader’s expected cost £32.00 Expected loss paying for none of this publisher’s bills £20.80

Three things fall out of that block and all three are worth a reader’s attention. The publisher’s interest in a conversion is a fraction of the reader’s expected cost rather than a mirror of it, so a page could be profitable at a third of the damage it helps produce. The two ends scale together, so a larger first payment raises both figures in the same proportion and changes nothing about the ratio. And the whole block rests on an assumed percentage, which is the figure a reader would most like to check and the one thing part five explains cannot be checked.

4

The two rules keeping the prose off the ordering

Offers appear on the guides in an order, and that order is produced somewhere other than the prose. Two rules hold the two apart, and both are rules about the writing rather than claims about anybody’s good intentions.

The first: no sentence anywhere describes a particular offer. Prose here describes a kind of offer, a shape of condition, or what an offshore cashier of the usual sort tends to ask for, and it sources no term to anything standing in an ordering. The second: no figure in any sentence is taken from an ordering. Every total on the domain is computed from the four house assumptions and from published rules, which has a consequence worth stating as a test rather than a promise. Change what the ordering holds and not one figure on any page moves. If a figure did move, the rule had been broken, and that is checkable by anybody who keeps a copy of a page.

The reason is practical as well as ethical. Terms change, arrangements lapse and placements rotate. Prose written against whatever stood somewhere on a Tuesday is wrong by Thursday and nobody rereads ninety pages to find the stale sentence. Prose written against the method keeps working, which is why the method page and not the ordering is what every guide links back to.

5

The part of this page a reader cannot check

Run this domain’s own sorter over this page and it divides cleanly. That commission is paid at all is settled on the banner, because the sentence saying so stands at the top of this page, costs the publisher something to print and can be read without a click. That the figures in part three reproduce is settled in the written terms of the method, because the four assumptions are named and the arithmetic is one multiplication long.

What any particular operator pays this publisher is settled nowhere in writing. Arrangements of that kind are not published by either party to them. No register records them, the British regulator’s own advertising rules say nothing at all about publishers of this sort beyond a duty on operators to take reasonable steps over the third parties they contract with, and there is no document a reader could open to establish the rate, the term, or whether one arrangement pays better than another.

So the limit has to be stated rather than dressed up. This page is a statement by the party holding the interest, which on the scale this domain applies to everybody else is the weakest sort of evidence there is. It is not a check and it cannot be made into one. An assurance from an interested party is exactly the thing the section on unwritten defaults prices rather than believes, and the honest entry against this claim is unreachable.

What that leaves a reader is a working test that does not depend on trusting this page. Take any figure from any guide, take the four assumptions, and recompute. The arithmetic either reproduces or it does not, and that result owes nothing whatever to whoever is paying. Where it does not reproduce, the contact page explains what happens next and how the correction is recorded.