If you are reading this, you have probably stumbled upon an article featuring items for sale at third party sites. These are a relatively new phenomenon at Bless You Boys, as Vox Media, our parent company, has recently begun forming more affiliate partnerships with various sites, vendors, and the like.
As a result, you may see more articles advertising various items for purchase in the future. We can’t say for sure what they will be, but we can promise a few things; first, we will do our best to limit the number of these articles that you see. There are enough ads around the internet, and we have no plans on peppering them into our daily content here at BYB.
Second, and most important, I think, is that we promise to be fully transparent with what these articles are and why they are appearing on the front page. Vox Media asks us to include a disclaimer that their affiliate partnerships do not influence editorial content. We do not entirely agree with this statement though, as those affiliate partnerships have now affected what goes up on our front page.
Our final promise is that these advertisements (hopefully few in nature) will always be written by a Bless You Boys staff member. They may be sponsored content, but they will still include our writing and our voice. It’s why we opted into this new affiliate program — if something goes up on our page, we want it to be written, edited, and approved by our staff. We’ll admit it; we get a small cut of whatever is purchased via these articles. This helps support our staff, as does our site Patreon. But the money isn’t important. We’re far more interested in maintaining control of our content as best we can.
If you think these advertisements are too plentiful and intrusive, please let us know. We will pass that information on to the powers that be, and do what we can to keep the ads to a minimum.