CounsellingResource.com Advertising Policy

Independent advertisers, please visit our Targeted Advertising page for information on how you can advertise on this site. We now provide content-driven, contextually relevant advertising in several sections of the site, and we welcome your feedback on how this advertising impacts on your use of CounsellingResource.com.

Our Advertising Policy

The CounsellingResource.com site is a free service, and third-party 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 comment form, 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 us) specifically where we have taken the time to evaluate a given product or service and believe that it provides value to our readers.

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.

Special Note on Reviews: Disclosure Policy

Talk to a Psychiatrist or Therapist Online

Since this site was founded, our policy has always been that we will not accept payments, kickbacks, free ‘goodies’, or any other type of incentive in exchange for providing an endorsement or positive review of a product or service. In addition, contributors writing reviews — even those whom we normally pay to write for us — are not paid for reviews.

You can be assured that if we ever change this policy or decide for whatever reason to make an exception to it, we will disclose it to you.

Some of our reviews are of products which have been personally purchased and are owned by the person writing the review. In all other cases, here’s how our reviews work:

Books
Publishers send us books, free of charge. We are under no obligation to review them positively — or to review them at all. (Indeed, historically, we have tended to review only a tiny proportion of the unsolicited books we have been sent.)
Hardware
Manufacturers send us hardware, free of charge. Unlike books, computer hardware is normally considered to have significant residual value after being used for a review and must be returned to the manufacturer after an agreed period of time. We are under no obligation to review hardware products positively — or to review them at all — but in practice, since we normally bear the cost of shipping hardware devices back to manufacturers, we try to avoid accepting unsolicited shipments of hardware devices we are not planning to review.
Software
Publishers send us a license to use their software (often a “Not for Resale” or “Review Only” license), free of charge. We are under no obligation to review it positively — or to review it at all.

In all cases, we aim to provide honest to goodness real world reviews and not merely regurgitated ad copy or press release copy. Particularly in the case of software and hardware products, we make a point of actually using the items in a real business or private practice environment — for a period of weeks or, preferably, months — to find out how they measure up.

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. 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.

All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .

Overseen by an international advisory board of distinguished academic faculty and mental health professionals with decades of clinical and research experience in the US, UK and Europe, CounsellingResource.com provides peer-reviewed mental health information you can trust. Our material is not intended as a substitute for direct consultation with a qualified mental health professional. CounsellingResource.com is accredited by the Health on the Net Foundation.

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