Trust
Sponsorship policy
This site is funded by sponsorship. That is not a secret and it is not a problem, as long as the boundaries are written down and visible to everyone on both sides of them. Here they are.
- Arena
- League and tournament title rights
- Academy
- Course and lecture-series underwriting
- Wire
- Clearly labelled newsletter placement
- Chapters
- State-level placement and meetup support
- Trade
- Jobs board and employer brand pages
- Partners
- A permanent partner page
- Reviews
- Scores, placement, pre-publication sight, removal
- Comparisons
- Inclusion, order, or criteria
- Forums
- Moderation outcomes or thread removal
- Member data
- Names, emails, licence numbers — not for sale
- Wire coverage
- Editorial news decisions
Labelling
Sponsored content is labelled at the top of the page, in the same label system as everything else, naming the sponsor. Not a grey line at the bottom, not the word “partner” doing quiet work. If a reader has to hunt for the disclosure, the disclosure has failed.
Underwriting is not editing
An underwritten course or lecture carries the underwriter’s name and nothing else of theirs. They do not select the instructor, review the curriculum, approve slides, or see the material before it runs. An entomologist who agrees to teach here is teaching, not presenting a sponsor’s deck, and we will not put them in a position where anyone could think otherwise.
Member data
Sponsors receive aggregate audience data only: how many members, and what kinds of work they do. They never receive individual member records, names or contact details, and there is no tier that unlocks them. Nobody joined LTK to be sold.
Where a member opts in to being contacted — for a job, a field trial, a research panel — that opt-in is specific, revocable, and initiated by the member.
Category exclusivity
A founding partner may hold category exclusivity. Exclusivity covers sponsorship inventory only. It does not extend to editorial coverage, and a competitor’s product will still be reviewed, compared and, if it is better, said to be better.
If we get this wrong
Tell us. Breaches of this policy get corrected publicly, on the page where they happened, with a date. A quietly fixed disclosure is worse than the original error.