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Glass & Ridge

Disclosure

Affiliate Disclosure

The short version: we earn a commission when you buy through our links, it costs you nothing extra, and it does not change what we recommend. The long version explains the mechanism.

How we make money

Glass & Ridge is supported by affiliate commission. When you click a product link on this site and buy something, the retailer pays us a percentage of the sale. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid without us. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.

This is the entire business model. There is no advertising on this site, no sponsored content, no paid placements, and no manufacturer pays us for a review or a ranking position.

Amazon Associates

Glass & Ridge is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Amazon is, in practice, the only retailer we earn from at launch. Our links carry the tracking tag imm-glassridge-20. Product prices and images on this site come from the Amazon Creators API; prices are accurate as of the date shown beside them and change constantly, so the price on Amazon at the moment you click is the one that applies.

Other affiliate networks

We may add other retailers over time where a program is genuinely active for us. We will not build a tracked link for a program we have not joined, and we will not route a buy button to a retailer whose tracking does not work - a click that lands somewhere untracked earns nothing and tells you nothing.

Several brands we write about sell direct rather than through Amazon, and we are not in an affiliate program with them. Where that is the case the page says so plainly and we earn nothing from that mention. We would rather tell you where a product actually comes from than pretend it is unavailable because we cannot be paid for it.

Every product link on this site points at an address on our own domain beginning /go/, which immediately redirects you to the retailer. If you hover a buy button and see glassandridge.com/go/vortex-viper-hd-10x42 rather than an Amazon URL, that is why.

There is nothing hidden in it. It does three things:

  • Keeps the tracking tag in exactly one place in our code, so it cannot be wrong on one page out of a hundred.
  • Lets us change which retailer a product points at without rewriting the article - useful when something goes out of stock.
  • Lets us count clicks so we know which recommendations people find useful.

It does not add tracking cookies of its own, it does not collect anything about you beyond what our privacy policy describes, and these links are excluded from search engines.

Why commission does not change our rankings

Saying "commission does not affect our picks" is cheap. Here is the mechanism that makes it checkable:

  • Our ranking criteria and their exact weights are published, per category, before any pick is made.
  • Every product card shows its score against each of those criteria, so you can see the working rather than the conclusion.
  • Every product carries a "skip it if" line naming the reader who should not buy it.

A commission-driven ordering would show up as a mismatch between those published rules and our output. In practice this site recommends the cheaper option repeatedly, including cases where the honest answer is that your current binoculars are fine.

Disclosure on individual pages

Every page with a product link carries a short disclosure above the first one, linking back here. The footer link alone is not enough, and we would rather over-disclose than have you discover it halfway down a page.

Questions

Email contact@glassandridge.com. Glass & Ridge is published by Iron Mako Media.