Affiliate disclosure

This site earns a commission when readers buy through its partner links. Here is exactly how that works and what it does and does not influence.

1. How the arrangement works

1. You read an article here and follow a link marked Partner link.
2. The link passes through an address on this domain (/c/...) and forwards you to the advertiser or to the affiliate network that manages the advertiser’s programme.
3. The network records the referral, typically with a cookie set on their domain, not ours.
4. If you subscribe, the network reports a qualifying sale and pays Consortexa s.r.o. a commission out of the advertiser’s marketing budget.
5. Your price is unaffected. Affiliate commission is a marketing cost the vendor already carries; it is not a surcharge added to your order.

2. What we do and do not receive

• We receive aggregate commission statements: counts of qualifying sales and amounts owed.
• We do not receive your name, your e-mail address, your postal address, your payment details or any other information identifying you.
• We do not receive payment for writing favourably, for placing a product first, or for page views. There is no sponsored content on this site.
• We are not given free products, review units or trial licences in exchange for coverage.

3. How commercial links are marked

We hold ourselves to four separate signals on every commercial link, because any one of them alone is easy to miss:

1. In the HTML: rel="sponsored nofollow noopener", so that search engines and automated checkers can see the relationship. The small script on this site re-applies these attributes rather than stripping them.
2. On the button: a visible Partner link label rendered inside every button, including the ones in the sidebar.
3. Under the button: a note stating that we earn a commission and that it costs you nothing extra.
4. Above the fold: a disclosure bar at the very top of every page, and a disclosure box immediately after the headline — both of which appear before any promotional content on the page.

4. Why we think this is compatible with honest writing

It is compatible only if the commission has no influence on the content, and the test of that is whether we are willing to publish things that reduce our own revenue. We are, and we do. Our main article states that the product we earn commission on covers a single device, does not include the VPN that most people assume it includes, renews at a higher price than advertised, and may be unnecessary for a reader who is content with the protection already built into Windows. Those statements cost us money. They are in the article because they are true.

The rules we hold ourselves to are written down in the editorial policy, including an explicit list of the sales practices we refuse: invented testimonials, fabricated ratings, artificial urgency and guaranteed-result claims.

5. Your privacy when you follow a partner link

This site sets no cookies and runs no tracking of any kind — see the cookie policy. When you follow a partner link you leave this domain, and from that moment the advertiser’s and the network’s own privacy and cookie policies apply. They will generally set an attribution cookie and will ask for your consent where they are required to. We have no control over and no access to that. The only thing our script does is copy campaign parameters that were already in your address bar onto the outbound link.

6. Regulatory basis

Disclosure of a commercial relationship is required, not optional: under Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices as implemented in Czech law, presenting paid promotion as independent editorial content is a misleading practice. We aim to exceed the minimum rather than meet it. It is also required by the advertising platform policies under which our content may be promoted.

If you think a link on this site is inadequately disclosed, tell us at info@novatova.online and we will fix it.