How this site is funded
Affiliate commission from Amazon, and nothing else. Here is exactly how that works and what it does not buy.
The short version
Glass & Gravel is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
When you click a buy button on this site and then purchase something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. It costs you nothing extra - the price is identical whether you arrive through us or type the address yourself.
That commission is the only revenue this site has. There is no subscription, no advertising, no sponsorship, and no paid placement.
How our links work, in detail
Every product link routes through /go/ on this domain before forwarding you to the retailer. That exists so we can change a destination in one place if a product moves or if we join a different program, and so we can count clicks for our own understanding of what the site is useful for.
The Amazon links carry our Associates tracking tag, glassandgravel-20. Every outbound commercial link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how search engines are told a link is commercial. Every buy button on this site is accompanied by an #ad marker and a link back to this page.
The /go/ routes are excluded from our sitemap and marked noindex, because they are redirects rather than content.
What the commission does not buy
These are commitments, not aspirations:
- No ranking is for sale. No manufacturer has paid for a place on this site, and none has been offered one.
- No product has been supplied free. We have received nothing from any manufacturer.
- No sponsored posts. Not one page here was commissioned or reviewed by a brand.
- Commission rate never affects placement. We do not rank by what pays best, and where a cheaper option is the right answer we say so even though it earns us less.
- Some of our strongest recommendations pay us nothing. Feed less. Cycle the tank before buying the fish. Buy a plain ten-gallon rather than a designer five-gallon kit. Turn the light down. None of those are purchases.
Prices
Where we show a price it comes from a live data layer with the date it was retrieved printed alongside it. If that data is more than 48 hours old, every price on the site disappears automatically and the buttons revert to “check price on Amazon”.
We never show a remembered or estimated price. Prices change constantly, and a stale number is worse than no number because it looks like information. At the time of writing this site holds no live price data, so every button reads “check price” - that is the system working, not a fault.
What we have not done
We have not tested these products. There is no test bench and no lab, and every page on this site says so. What we do instead - published specifications and arithmetic you can redo - is set out in full, because a method you can check is the only substitute we can honestly offer for testing we have not done.
Programs we are in
Amazon Associates. That is the complete list at present.
If we join another affiliate program, this page will say so before any link to it goes live. We do not build tracking links for programs we have not joined.
No livestock
We do not link to live animals - not fish, not shrimp, not snails, not plants where we can avoid it - and would not even if a marketplace made it easy. A live animal shipped to a stranger on the strength of an affiliate link is not a commission we want. Buy livestock from a shop where you can look at it first.
This makes the stocking hub the least profitable part of the site. It is also the part most likely to stop somebody killing an animal, which is a trade we are content with.
FTC compliance
United States Federal Trade Commission guidance requires clear and conspicuous disclosure of material connections between a publisher and the products it recommends. Our material connection is affiliate commission, disclosed here, on every commercial page above the first link, under every buy button, and in the footer of every page on the site.
Questions
If anything on this page is unclear, or you think a link is not properly disclosed: info@glassandgravel.com. We will fix it.
Glass & Gravel is published by Slate Mill Group.