Report card

security.org

Not scored — monetization not established

Generated 2026-09-17 under SPEC: Scoring — v0.6.12. State: Not scored — monetization not established.

Monetization exposure — what was observed

A pick whose status was not established is counted apart from a pick observed to be unmonetized. Each reason is published on its own, because they are different situations and one of them is about us rather than about the publisher:

Marked sponsored by the publisher — what was observed on those links

No direct merchant links on this publisher carry the publisher’s own rel="sponsored" without a detected affiliate mechanism.

Declared, not observed

No pick on this publisher is priced from a merchant declared in the link.

Payout–Rank correlation

The card records Not scored — monetization not established as the headline it would print, and prints no median, no interval and no Kickback Score. The inputs below are published anyway, so the same computation can be run against them.

Disclosure

§1.5 is purely positional. The A/B boundary here is measured against the first OUTBOUND link, which is at or before the first AFFILIATE link, so this test is stricter than §1.5 and can only understate a grade, never overstate one.

Diagnostics published beside the figures

Count of qualifying articles with ρ > 0.99 at n ≤ 5.

Articles excluded from the pool, by reason

Reasons may co-occur on the same article, so these counts do not sum to a total.

Limitations that apply to this publisher

1. Some of this publisher’s outbound product links route through a redirect endpoint that its own robots.txt disallows us from resolving. We respect robots.txt on every request, including to redirect endpoints. For those links we do not know the merchant, so we do not know the commission rate, so those picks are recorded as unknown and excluded from the Payout–Rank correlation. They are not counted as unmonetized and no rate is estimated for them. This is a property of the publisher’s configuration, not of the method.
2. A monetization exposure of 0 means no AFFILIATE monetization was detected in the articles sampled. It does not mean the publisher earns nothing. This method observes outbound links on public pages and whether they carry affiliate attribution. It is blind to display advertising, sponsored placement paid outside an affiliate network, subscriptions, licensing and paid product placement. The sample size is stated next to the claim.
3. This publisher’s measured affiliate monetization is 0, and this card does NOT conclude that it takes no affiliate revenue. That conclusion requires every pick’s monetization status to have been positively observed as absent. On this publisher some picks are unknown rather than observed-absent, for the reasons counted above. An unknown is not a zero. The card states what was and was not observed and draws no conclusion from the gap.

Right of reply

State: silent. We wrote to this publisher and the seven-day window closed without a reply. Not replying is not agreement with anything on this card, and we do not present it as one.

Written to info@security.org on 2026-09-10T00:11:01Z. Basis for that address: published site contact Seven-day window closes 2026-09-17T00:11:01.000Z.

Nothing has been received from this publisher.

Confounds, stated by us, first

1. Reverse causality. A publisher may negotiate a higher rate because it already ranks a product well. The §5 event study partially addresses this by measuring ranking changes after rate changes. It does not eliminate it.
2. Category confounding. High-commission categories may differ in quality.
3. Brand-size confounding. Products with affiliate programs skew toward larger brands, which may be better on average.
4. Rate coverage. We observe roughly half the market. The rate coverage figure on this card is the measured share for this publisher.
5. Editorial firewalls are real. Where the median ρ is at or below zero, that is stated on this card in the same size type as every other number.
6. Private-network rate invisibility. Merchants on Impact, CJ, Rakuten and Partnerize keep rates private, so their picks carry r = null and are dropped from ρ. Those are systematically different merchants from Amazon’s — large retailers rather than marketplace sellers. The sign of the resulting bias is indeterminate.
7. Per-transaction earnings caps and negotiated tiers mean a published nominal rate is an upper-bound proxy for effective compensation. eBay’s published rate card carries a per-transaction cap on every category (550 USD on Electronics, 100 USD on eBay Motors and on Real Estate) and states that exceptions to the rate card exist for certain partners. Roborock publishes 4%–7% and Narwal 4%–10%, and where a given publisher’s tier falls within either band is negotiated privately. On a high-priced item a per-transaction cap can put the amount actually earned, expressed as a percentage of price, below the published rate. This is a disclosure: it moves no estimator and no r_i.

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