CounsellingResource.com Advertising Policy

Our Advertising Policy

The CounsellingResource.com site is a free service, and advertising helps us offset the significant costs of maintaining that free service. However, we also focus specifically on advertising solutions which we believe can add genuine value to the experience of visitors to this site. Naturally, not every advertisement will be of interest to every visitor, but we make an effort to ensure that, on balance, the presence of advertisements enhances rather than detracts from our site.

Advertisements may not be posted by third parties anywhere on the site, except in designated areas. (Specifically, advertisements may not be posted without permission in the Discussion Forums, the site Blog, or other areas where individual visitors may modify the content of our site.) All ordinary advertisements will be clearly marked as such.

We also provide a small number of affiliate links (which offer revenue sharing to CounsellingResource.com) specifically where we personally recommend a given product or service -- for example in our Research Library links to Amazon book pages. Where affiliate links are used for ordinary advertising, as distinct from forming a part of a specific recommendation, they are clearly marked as such.

About Contextual Advertising

Most advertising presently displayed on CounsellingResource.com works via third party solutions from Google and others which intelligently assess which advertisements are pertinent to the content of the page being viewed. This system carries two important benefits:

1. Displayed advertisements should, ideally, be related to the context of what you are reading, and
2. Advertising cannot bias the content or editorial policy of this site (because the advertising depends on what is written, rather than what is written being influenced by the interests of whatever third party is paying for the advertising).

In other words, we produce a CounsellingResource.com page as usual, without regard for the interests of any potential advertiser, and if a given advertisement is relevant to the contents of that page, then it may be displayed. We have no way of knowing in advance whether an advertiser will like what has been written, so we are not influenced in any way by advertisers appearing on this site through contextual targeting.

This contrasts with the traditional way of providing advertising, where the financial relationship between a site and an advertiser could compromise the editorial integrity of the site.

This problem of editorial influence is particularly true of those sites -- you know who you are -- who derive the overwhelming proportion of their advertising revenue from pharmaceutical company banners stuffed into every nook and cranny, and yet claim that they are not in any way beholden to those pharmaceutical companies.

Do You Endorse Displayed Advertisements?

Because contextual advertisements are displayed as a result of pertinence to page content (as described above), rather than as a result of explicit arrangement with CounsellingResource.com, we do not actually know in advance what advertisements may be displayed. Therefore, we cannot make any comment on the advertisers featured.

Additional Forms of Advertising

We work with several forms of advertising and several types of advertisers. Please note that not all advertisements displayed on CounsellingResource.com are chosen automatically. For example, a small selection of affiliate links have been included where we specifically recommend a given product or service (including Amazon affiliate links in our Research Library section). See our additional information on targeted advertising opportunities for more details of how you may be able to advertise on this site.

Feedback About CounsellingResource.com Advertising?

Visitor feedback has proven very valuable in helping us shape our advertising options, and we welcome additional comments about our choice of advertising technologies and their impact on your use of the site. Please get in touch with us via the Contact Details page with any and all feedback about our advertising arrangements.