Ownership & Funding
Why we publish this page
You cannot fully judge a news source without knowing who owns it and who pays for it, because ownership and money are where pressure on coverage comes from. This page answers both questions for STUDIO ONE NETWORKS as plainly as we can, and it commits us to updating this page first if any of the answers ever change.
Who owns the site
STUDIO ONE NETWORKS is independently owned and operated. It is not a subsidiary of a media group, has no corporate parent, and is not affiliated with any political party, government, religious organization, lobby or activist group anywhere in the world. No outside investor holds a stake, which means no shareholder expectations shape the coverage and nobody outside the editorial operation can apply commercial pressure to it. The people who own the site are the people who run it.
Where the money comes from
The site’s revenue comes from two sources, and only two:
Advertising. Display advertising served programmatically through standard ad networks makes up the bulk of our income. Programmatic means the ads are placed by automated exchanges based on the page and, where readers have consented, on interest categories; it also means we generally do not have a direct relationship with the advertisers whose ads appear. They buy audience through a network; they do not buy access to us. Direct advertising placements, when we take them, run under the rules on our Advertise With Us page and are always visually distinct from editorial content.
Affiliate commissions. Some product-related coverage, chiefly in technology, gaming, auto and lifestyle, contains affiliate links. If a reader buys through such a link, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to the reader. Every article containing affiliate links discloses it. Commission rates play no role in what we choose to cover or what we conclude about a product; a product that earns us nothing gets the same honest treatment as one that does.
What we do not take
We accept no government funding, no political money, no payment for coverage, and no undisclosed sponsorship. Nobody can pay to be written about, to be written about kindly, or to have a story removed; such offers arrive at every news site and are declined at this one. We do not run press releases as news, and we do not publish paid guest posts in our editorial sections. If sponsored content ever appears on this site, it will be labeled as sponsored in a way no reader could miss.
The wall between money and coverage
The arrangement that keeps advertising honest is separation, and ours is strict: advertisers have no knowledge of stories before publication, no channel to request coverage or suppression, and no influence on editorial decisions of any kind. Ad placement on a page is automated and unrelated to the story’s content beyond broad suitability categories. When our coverage concerns a company whose ads may appear on the site through the networks, the coverage proceeds exactly as it would for any other company; the first the network learns of a critical story is when it is published. The standards that enforce this wall are set out in our Editorial Standards.
What funds are for
Revenue pays for what running an independent news operation costs: the editorial team’s time, hosting and infrastructure, licensing, and the tools of verification and production. There is no profit target that overrides editorial judgment, and no growth mandate imposed from outside, because there is no outside.
The honest corollary of this model is worth stating: an ad-funded site depends on traffic, and traffic pressure is the subtlest force acting on any newsroom, ours included. Our defense against it is written into our Editorial Standards: headlines must be supported by their stories, speed never outranks verification, and a story is published because it is worth reading, not because it will be widely clicked. We name the pressure here precisely because pretending it does not exist is how sites quietly succumb to it.
If any of this changes
Ownership structures and funding models can change; transparency about them must not. If the site ever takes investment, changes hands, adds a revenue stream or enters any relationship that a reasonable reader would want to know about when weighing our coverage, this page will be updated before or at the time of the change, and a significant change would be disclosed prominently, not buried here. Questions about anything on this page can be sent to support@studioonenetworks.com, and will be answered by the people the page describes.
