Unlicensed gambling, illegal betting, or products that evade local age and location rules
COMMERCIAL POLICY / 1.1
Editorial
independence.
Money may fund the work. It may not purchase a finding, ranking, topic outcome, citation, correction decision, or quieter disclosure.
DISPLAY ADSVERIFYING
PAID SUBSCRIPTIONSOFF
SPONSORED RESEARCHNOT ACCEPTED
AFFILIATE LINKSOFF
CURRENT STATUS
Verification first.
AdSense ownership verification is installed. Ad requests remain off until Google approval, consent controls, a manual slot, and reader-experience checks are complete.
Paid subscriptions, affiliate links, and sponsored research remain off.
Privacy and ad status →01 / EDITORIAL FIREWALL
What money cannot buy.
- 01
Advertisers and sponsors cannot select research conclusions, rankings, model inputs, thresholds, or publication decisions.
- 02
Commercial partners cannot review unpublished research except to verify a clearly labeled factual description of their own product or service.
- 03
No payment can buy a favorable mention, followed link, citation, ranking change, article edit, correction delay, or suppression of an adverse result.
- 04
Research staff disclose material financial relationships next to affected work and recuse themselves when the conflict cannot be managed.
- 05
Revenue performance is never an input to research prioritization or model output. Reader utility and the registered research calendar control the queue.
02 / PLACEMENT RULES
Two article ads maximum.
Manual placements use reserved space and stay out of tools, charts, tables, citations, and Research Files.
ALLOWED
+ One reserved block after the central finding and its supporting visual sequence
+ One reserved block after the conclusion and before the Research File
BLOCKED
× Headlines, decks, bylines, research charts, data tables, citations, methodology steps, correction notices, and publication decisions
× Interstitials, pop-unders, autoplay audio or video, countdowns, sticky overlays, notification prompts, and disguised navigation
× Any placement that causes content movement after load or makes the research harder to read
03 / LABELS
Commercial content should look commercial.
PROGRAMMATICADVERTISEMENT
DIRECTSPONSORED
COMPENSATED LINKAFFILIATE LINK
- Labels appear before the commercial content in text that remains visible on mobile.
- Commercial units may not imitate research cards, charts, alerts, buttons, or editorial typography.
- Sponsored material names the payer and describes the relationship on the page.
- Affiliate links disclose the compensation rule before the first compensated link.
04 / BLOCKED CATEGORIES
Inventory we will not sell.
Fantasy decision-making already contains incentives and conflicts. The publication should not quietly add more of them next to a result.
Sportsbooks, daily-fantasy operators, and paid fantasy ranking or projection products
Political campaigns, issue advocacy, and election fundraising
Tobacco, nicotine, weapons, adult content, and recreational drugs
Payday lending, deceptive credit, get-rich-quick products, and speculative schemes presented as certain returns
Unsubstantiated health, supplement, injury-recovery, or performance claims
Malware, surveillance software, counterfeit goods, and misleading subscription offers
05 / DATA + PRIVACY
Reader and research data are not targeting inventory.
Research inputs, subscriber records, and unpublished evidence are not shared with advertisers for targeting.
Sensitive or cross-site behavioral targeting is not a condition of buying access to Fourth Down Labs inventory.
Any future ad or analytics vendor must be named in the privacy disclosure before production use.
The publication will prefer contextual placement and the smallest practical data footprint.
06 / ENFORCEMENT
A breach creates a record.
Commercial conflicts and policy breaches enter the public correction ledger when they affect published work.
A violating unit is removed without waiting for a campaign cycle to end.
Material policy changes receive a new version and effective date; the repository preserves the diff.
Ad requests remain disabled until AdSense approval, consent controls, a manual slot, and reader-experience tests all pass.
MACHINE-READABLE POLICY
Download JSON ↗Version 1.1 · Effective 2026-08-31 · Repository history preserves every change.