Serious Eats
An Open Letter To Our Community About Our Sponsors
Recently there's been a lot of talk around the boards and in the comments to certain posts about our policies for dealing with sponsored content, so in the interest of maintaining our on-going dialogue with our treasured community, we thought it'd be a wise idea to share our thoughts with you.
Let's start with this: Serious Eats has been and always will be about total transparency and open communication with all of our readers. You, the Serious Eats community, are what make this site so fantastic, so your thoughts and feelings are always our primary concern. Every single comment is taken seriously!
While not everyone in our ever-growing community of serious eaters will be persuaded to try the simple "open-a-can-and-stir" recipes offered by some of our sponsors, many readers (and more than a few of us at SE World HQ) appreciate these sort of time-saving "problem-solver" recipes, which just reconfirms our notion that there's room for all sorts of readers, recipes, and community members in the Serious Eats world.
Serious Eats tries very hard to be an inclusive, democratic site. We respect all of you—the Serious Eats community—and your happiness is always our primary concern. We don't judge anyone for their food choices, no matter how different from our own. Our mission is simple: to present you with the most delicious food out there. The beauty of the blog format is that if there's ever an article or recipe that you are uninterested in, just wait 15 minutes, and it'll slide on down the page to be replaced by something new.
Our Advertisement Policy
Serious Eats is supported by advertising. Without it, we would not be able to provide you, the Serious Eats community, with the high-quality free content that we pride ourselves on producing eighteen hours a day seven days a week, which includes more than 150 generated-in-house posts a week that are carefully chosen, written, and edited with your pleasure and edification in mind. We try our best to ensure that our readers remain completely informed of what's going on to give them the option of choosing whether or not to click on our sponsored content links. We never accept pay-per-post and we are always transparent with our readers about our sponsors.The following are some of the most common kinds of sponsorships and advertising opportunities available on Serious Eats, through our ad sales partner Federated Media:Regular Display Advertisements
These appear either in the sidebar, at the very top of the page, within the body of archive pages, or occasionally along the bottom in a close-able window. Audio in these advertisements must be user-initiated. Expanding banners should appear within each browser only once daily. We strive to work with our advertising partners to ensure that all advertisements that appear on our site are relevant to our readers. Occasionally, ads that violate these guidelines slip through the cracks. If you see any ads that violate these policies, please contact us, and we'll work to get it removed immediately. Sponsors have no input into our regular posts.
Sponsored Series
Advertisers sometimes sponsor a series of posts or a column on a particular theme. The sponsor's logo will appear with a short, unobtrusive message at the top of the post, and their advertisement may appear in a sidebar. While it's true that we discuss our thoughts beforehand with specific sponsors, our agreements with them are for general content guidelines only—sponsors do not have editorial input or approval.
Advertorials
Advertisements that appear in an editorial format, but are written 100% by our sponsor. Serious Eats neither writes nor edits any of the content. These posts will always be very clearly demarcated with the word "SPONSOR" above the title and/or be titled "Sponsor Post:[ ]", and the author of the post will always be the name of the sponsor.
Additionally, from now on, all advertorials will be closed for comments. This is because historically, comments on these types of posts inevitably ended up talking more about our advertising policies than the content of the post itself. This doesn't mean we don't want your feedback on these posts—the best way to share your feedback is in Talk --> Site Feedback or by sending us an email.
As always, we welcome any and all feedback to help us improve our site and our content.
