Affiliate links

Which links are affiliate links

Only the buttons leading to dating services are affiliate links. They look like buttons rather than ordinary text, and they sit in the commercial sections: comparisons, prices, finding a partner, anonymous services.

Not affiliate links: all source links — poliisi.fi, kkv.fi, tietosuoja.fi, Statistics Finland, the services’ own pages in the source list, the texts of laws. We get nothing from those, and they are there so that a reader can check us.

Not affiliate links: internal links between our own pages.

You can check any link by hovering over it and looking at the browser status bar. An affiliate link starts with /go — our internal address, which adds a label and forwards you on.

Where there are none, and why

The entire safety section — romance fraud, fake profiles, blackmail with images, first-meeting safety, and the examination of claims against paid services — is not monetised. Not a single affiliate link, not a single button.

The same goes for the privacy section: what apps collect, how to delete your data, and dating anonymously.

The reason is not high-mindedness. Someone reading about blackmail or about the signs of a scammer is not in a state where it is appropriate to sell them anything. A “sign up” button next to the instruction “do not pay the blackmailer” devalues the instruction.

There is a practical reason too, and we say it plainly: an authority or a sector organisation will not link to a page that leads to an offer. A section that is not commercial can receive links from places a commercial one never will.

Technically this is written into the code, not into a promise. Every page has a monetisation flag, and the template simply does not render a button where that flag is off. You can check it by opening any page in the safety section: it carries a note saying there are no affiliate links in that section, and the note comes from the same flag.

What we pass to the partner

When you click through, we add a label to the link in the form seo_fi_ru_price_seksitreffit_table.

It breaks down as: traffic source, country, page language, section, page address, and the place where the button stood. There is nothing else in it.

No email address, no IP address, no name, no age and no precise location is passed on. The label is assembled from a fixed template out of predefined values, and personal data cannot technically end up in it.

It serves one purpose: working out which pages bring people for whom the service actually turned out to be right. The same thing distinguishes a page that collects clicks from a page that is useful.

Does the commission affect what we write

It does not affect the order or the assessments, and you can check that against the published criteria.

We do not compile a list of “best sites”. In such lists the order is usually decided by the size of the commission, and that is exactly why we do not make them. Instead we have published five criteria and a way to check each of them yourself in ten minutes.

It does affect the choice of topics, and it is most honest to say so. The commercial sections exist because the site has to live on something. But the content inside them is written the same way regardless of whether a partner pays more or less, and the texts include “who this is not for” sections, which no ranking list has.

One sign of this: on the page about free versus paid dating sites the honest answer is often “free”, and that is what it says there, even though the section is commercial.

Frequently asked