Funding
This is a business. It is intended to make money and to keep existing because it makes money. Saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise, and it lets you weigh what you read here against what pays for it.
The same logic as the rest of the site applies: we do not ask to be trusted, we tell you the arrangement so you can judge it.
How it makes money
- Reader support. Direct, voluntary, and currently the main thing.
- Membership, planned. Paid members will get the full graded source lists, the raw extraction files, and the archive. The records themselves will not go behind a paywall.
- Video revenue, on the platforms where the records also appear as longform video.
- Research licensing, eventually. Newsrooms, documentary producers and podcasters do this work by hand, and the corpora have value to them.
What it will never do
No advertising. Not display, not native, not affiliate links inside a record. This is a product decision, not a virtue: advertising pays for volume and attention, and this only works if the incentive is to be right instead. There will not be an ad next to a record about someone's worst day.
No payment from any party. We take nothing from anyone with a stake in how a record comes out: no party to a case, no agency, no company, no advocacy organization. If someone offers, it is disclosed here.
No money on records about private individuals. Where the central subject is a private person rather than an institution or a public figure, that record carries no advertising, no paywall, no sponsor, and no request for money. There is no support link on those pages.
No sponsor involvement. If sponsorship ever exists, it will be disclosed above the content, and a sponsor will never see a record before publication or influence what gets covered.
These are commitments, not descriptions of a current happy accident. If any of them changes, it changes on this page first, with the date and the reason.
What supporters get
Nothing that affects the work.
- No influence over what gets covered. The queue is public, and money does not move anything up it
- No early access. Records publish to everyone at once
- No named credit, unless you ask
- Membership buys the source apparatus and the archive, never a different version of the record
If that sounds like a thin offer, it is meant to. Anything more would compromise the thing you are paying for.
Questions
corrections@therecordbelow.com