BikeRadar doesn’t charge for its content so how do we make the money to pay our journalists and keep our servers online?
Below we’ve outlined where the cash comes from to keep the good ship BikeRadar afloat.
Advertising
Like many websites, we sell advertising space to companies who are selling a product that you might be interested in. We get paid according to how many people see those ads.
For example, we may sell an advertiser a set number of views of its ad and once the ad has been shown that many times, it gets removed and replaced with a different one.
We try to ensure that the advertising we display is as relevant as possible, so you should see ads for bike-related stuff rather than, say, online casinos. (If you do see any inappropriate ads, please let us know via our contact form.)
Sponsored content
We work with our commercial partners to create content (written articles, videos and social posts, for example) to promote their products or services.
This content may be created by the company that paid for it or by a writer or video producer at Immediate Media (publisher of BikeRadar) with direction from the commercial partner. We always mark these posts as ‘sponsored’ or ‘promoted’ or, if it’s a social post, with the hashtag #spon or #sponsored. Any sponsored content that's posted to Facebook will be marked as 'paid'.
At the bottom of each article, below the related links and above the comments, you’ll see a sponsored content box called ‘Sponsored content recommended by Outbrain’ which links to articles elsewhere on the web.
The content in these boxes is selected by Outbrain based on what is popular with readers on BikeRadar and other sites that use the same service, and we earn money when people click these links. We don’t manually select the stories to go into that box, but if we see any that we feel are inappropriate we can remove them.
In some instances we sell product placement for videos. For example, a bike rack manufacturer may pay us to have their product included in a video about cycling holidays. In these instances we’ll notify you in that article or video description that the product is included as part of a paid product placement agreement. Here’s an example.
Affiliate revenue
Affiliate revenue is the term for the small commission we get paid if you click a link to a shopping site and then buy a product from that site.
Most of our shopping links are affiliate links — they appear in places including the deals widget on the right-hand side of the homepage, the ‘Compare deals’ box that you’ll find at the bottom of many of our reviews and in product roundups such as BikeRadar Bargains and gift guides.
The commission fee that the retailer pays us is not added to your basket price so the price you pay is the same whether you click from BikeRadar or go direct to the retailer’s site.
And that’s how we make our money!
