Advertising Policy

The editorial/advertising wall

The editorial team and the advertising team do not share a manager and do not sit in the same weekly meetings. Advertisers cannot see our editorial calendar, and editors cannot see the advertiser pipeline. This separation is the single most important guarantee we can offer readers.

If an advertiser attempts to influence a review — for example by threatening to pull a campaign in response to negative coverage — the advertising relationship ends. This has happened, and we have honored it.

Formats we accept

We currently accept the following ad formats:

• Programmatic display. Standard IAB banner units delivered through vetted networks (Google AdSense / Ad Manager, Ezoic, Media.net). We never accept adult, gambling or malvertising creatives.
• Direct display. Sold on a monthly basis. Creative must be static or lightly animated, must not autoplay audio, and must load below 200 KB.
• Sponsored content. Clearly labelled as “Sponsored” at the top of the article and excluded from Google News/AI-Overview inclusion via appropriate meta tags.
• Newsletter placements. One paid slot per newsletter, labelled “Ad”.

Formats we do not accept

We refuse:

• Pop-ups, pop-unders, sound-on autoplay video, and interstitials over primary content.
• Ads for real-money gambling, unregulated crypto tokens, adult content, weapons or firearms.
• Malvertising and misleading creatives (fake system alerts, fake download buttons, fake virus warnings).
• Native placements that mimic editorial reviews without a clear “Sponsored” label.
• Any placement that would violate the Google Publisher Policies or applicable local law.

Disclosures

Every paid placement is labelled. Programmatic banners carry an “Ad” marker from the ad network. Direct placements carry a “Sponsored by [advertiser]” strip. Sponsored articles carry a top-of-article disclosure box that names the advertiser and the amount paid (banded, not exact) and lists which editorial staff, if any, were involved.

Affiliate links, where used, carry a #ad or #affiliate tag near the link. We use affiliate links only for products we would have recommended anyway and never let them influence a safety verdict.

Advertiser vetting

Before accepting a direct campaign, we vet the advertiser. We check:

• Business registration or verifiable digital identity.
• Product safety (no malware, no scams).
• Landing-page compliance with our tech policy (no crypto-mining scripts, no covert redirects).
• Compatibility with our audience — we prefer gaming, developer-tool, VPN and consumer-tech categories.

Reader controls

Readers can influence what advertising they see by using ad-preference tools in their browser and by opting out of personalised advertising through the YourAdChoices or Your Online Choices portals. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain the data we and our advertising partners collect.

Contact for advertisers

Media kits, rate cards and direct-campaign inquiries should go to [email protected]. Editorial pitches sent to this address are routed to /dev/null; please use [email protected] for those.

Ad performance & safety monitoring

Programmatic advertising can serve millions of creatives that neither the publisher nor the ad network has seen individually. That is a real risk. To keep readers safe, we monitor a rolling sample of ad creatives on the site, block advertiser categories at the network level, and enforce a strict ads.txt policy so scammers cannot resell our inventory without our permission.

Every quarter we audit the top 200 creatives shown to our audience and remove any that violate our standards — fake system alerts, misleading download buttons, deceptive language, undisclosed adult content. If you see an ad on our site that looks suspicious, please forward a screenshot and the URL to [email protected] so we can act on it fast.

Rates & formats snapshot

We publish a media kit each January with the previous year’s numbers: sessions, uniques, top geographies, audience skew, average time on page and standard rate cards for direct campaigns. Sensitive numbers are kept private and shared only with vetted advertisers under NDA. To request the current kit, write to [email protected] with the subject line “Media kit request”.

Complaints about advertising

If you see an ad on modenu.com that looks deceptive, that leads to a scam, that autoplays sound, or that seems inappropriate for our audience, please tell us. Send a screenshot, the page URL you were on and (if possible) the destination URL to [email protected]. We forward every report to the responsible ad network within the same business day and block the creative at the site level while the network investigates.

Reader reports are the single most effective way we spot bad creatives — ad networks miss things, and our own sampling only catches a fraction of what flows through the auction. If you take the time to report, you make the site safer for everyone.