Disclosure / Privacy Policy
This blog is a personal blog written and edited by one person. Authors or editors may be added from time to time.
Advertising and compensation
This blog may accept forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.
The compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third-party ad network. Those advertisements may or may not be identified as paid advertisements.
The owner of this blog may or may not be compensated to provide an opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner may or may not receive compensation for posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blogger’s own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.
This blog does contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified.
Cookies and third-party advertising
Third-party vendors used cookies to serve advertisements on this site. Those cookies enabled advertisements to be served based on a visitor’s prior visits to this site and to other sites on the internet. Visitors were able to opt out of that use through the relevant ad network’s privacy controls.
Notes on publication
Two things have been changed from the page as published, and both are deliberate.
Private operational details are omitted. The blog stopped publishing in 2012, and this page is retained only as historical publishing context. The scope page explains the published-material policy.
The advertising described above is historical. This site carries no advertising, ad network, sponsorship or affiliate arrangement. The section documents the blog’s publishing context and does not describe the site you are reading.
Why a policy like this existed at all
Disclosure pages arrived on personal blogs almost overnight in late 2009, when the Federal Trade Commission’s revised endorsement guides made it explicit that a blogger who received a free product or a payment had to say so. A small industry of policy generators appeared within weeks, and the wording above is recognisably from one of them — which is why the same paragraphs turn up, near-identically, on thousands of blogs of the period.
The guidance itself has been updated repeatedly since and remains the reference point for anyone writing about products online today. The blog’s contest rules were drafted with the same considerations in mind.
What the policy tells you about the blog
This page describes a specific and fairly brief moment in independent publishing: the point at which personal blogs had become large enough to be worth advertising against, but before the money had arrived in enough quantity to change what they were.
The tell is the hedging. “May or may not accept.” “May or may not be compensated.” That is not evasiveness — it is a template written to cover every blogger who might paste it in, and its vagueness is the point. A blog like this one carried a small ad unit that generated a negligible amount of money, and was occasionally offered a product to write about. The policy exists because the rules said it had to, not because there was much to disclose.
What is worth noticing is the sentence that does not hedge: the views expressed are the blogger’s own, and any product claim should be verified with whoever is making it. That line was doing real work. The whole basis of a blog like this was that the person writing it was not selling you anything, and the readership — a few dozen people who all knew each other — would have noticed immediately if that had stopped being true.
There is no advertising here, nothing sponsored, and nothing being recommended for money. The licence page sets out the corresponding position on reuse, and the readers page covers privacy and ownership.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou