Affiliate disclosure

Marker & Method is funded by affiliate commissions. When you click a link to a course and buy, we may earn a commission from the seller at no extra cost to you. This page explains exactly how that works, because the whole point of a review desk is that you can trust it.

Who we link to

The courses we review are sold on third-party platforms, principally SitStayLearn, a multi-instructor marketplace of online dog-training courses. Our links to those courses carry a tracking code that tells the seller the visit came from us.

How the commission works

Attribution is cookie-based. When you click one of our links, a cookie records that you arrived through us, and if you buy within the cookie window, we are credited. In practice this means we can write a critical review, link to the platform so you can see the course for yourself, and still be funded if you end up buying something that suits you better. We never have to push a course we do not believe in to keep the lights on.

The rule that protects you

The rubric decides the verdict. The affiliate link follows the verdict. Never the reverse. We score every course on the same two-axis rubric before any commercial consideration enters, and the score is what sets the recommendation. Concretely, that means:

• A course we think is excellent gets a clear recommendation and a prominent link, because we genuinely believe in it.
• A course we think is weak gets a critical review and a soft, honest link, usually alongside the better-aligned alternative we would choose instead.
• When the best option for your situation is something we cannot earn from, we tell you anyway, including when the honest answer is "do not buy a course, see a professional."

What we will never do

• Bury a true negative to protect a commission.
• Invent testing or personal stories to sell a course.
• Use fear or guilt to push a purchase.
• Let a higher payout move a course up a ranking.

Marking of links

Affiliate links are marked where they appear, and they carry the appropriate technical attributes so they are transparent to you and to search engines. This disclosure is linked from every page that carries a commercial link, in keeping with the United States Federal Trade Commission's guidance on endorsements.

The standing deal notice

You may see a small bar at the bottom of some pages noting that SitStayLearn runs a standing daily deal, usually around half off a rotating course. That is a real, ongoing feature of the platform, not a markup, a fake countdown, or a sale we invented, and we mention it only because it is true and useful. The link in that bar is an affiliate link like any other, it carries the same disclosure, and it never appears on a review where we tell you not to buy. You can dismiss it and it stays gone.

How we measure the site

We keep our own analytics light and private. We use a cookieless, privacy-friendly analytics tool that counts page views and the broad source a visit came from (a search engine, a forum, a direct visit) in aggregate only. It sets no cookies and does not follow you around other sites. For affiliate attribution we also keep one coarse, non-identifying label, the broad source of your visit, in your browser's session storage for the current tab only; it holds no personal information and is gone when you close the tab. None of this builds a profile of you or tracks you across the web. We look at it for one reason: to learn which articles are actually useful and whether our work is reaching the people it is meant for. When you then follow an affiliate link, the seller's own cookie-based attribution takes over, exactly as described above, and that is separate from how we measure our own pages.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a verdict reads as if money shaded it, tell us at hello@markermethod.com. Holding us to this is the point.