At The Metaphysical Compass, we believe that including advertising that is not relevant to the website is not beneficial for neither the website itself nor to its readers. In fact, it would not be consistent with the ethos of the project.
We also believe that any potential economic gain should come from the voluntary decision of those users who believe they have benefited from the content freely presented here.
Therefore, we have decided to use affiliate links for those who feel that the work offered here for free has brought them value and wish to contribute, at no additional cost to them, to the growth and maintenance of the site.
This business model also implies that all contributors will have acquired a recommended product that will further increase their knowledge on the topics covered in this site, linking their benefit to that of the site in what can be defined as a positive feedback loop.
Affiliate Links
What is an affiliate link? Sometimes when we recommend a product (usually a book), we will add a link to the websites of some of the most popular and convenient sellers using what is known as an affiliate or referral link. Basically, if you end up buying a product that you found via our link, we get a commission from the vendor as a small “thank you.”
Sometimes that commission is just a few dollars; sometimes it’s a little more, depending on the price of the product you bought. The most important thing, however, is that buying through our link does not cost you any extra pennies. The entire commission comes out of the vendor’s pocket, not yours.
Obviously, we will only recommend products that we ourselves have evaluated and found useful. Many times, the recommended works will be renowned works in their respective fields. Other times, they will be more obscure hidden gems that we have found especially useful in our journey.
So that you can easily tell when we’re using an affiliate link, we’ll put the term “affiliate link” before the actual links at the end of the articles.
It is possible that some specific link inside the main text of an article (e.g. in the notes), however, is not marked as clearly as this. The safest thing to assume, then, is that any time we link to a third-party product, we might get a small commission.
As a consequence of using this model, we hope that The Metaphysical Compass will remain a free content site for the foreseeable future.
