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Ownership & Funding

Why this page exists

People who read about technology have good reason to be wary. A great deal of what presents itself as coverage of Microsoft is marketing wearing a newsroom’s clothes: sites operated by resellers, reviews paid for by the reviewed, comparison tables ordered by who paid most, and enthusiasm quietly underwritten by a partner programme. A reader’s only protection is disclosure, and disclosure is worth something only when it is specific. This page says who owns WinAddons, where the money comes from and what the money is not allowed to buy.

Ownership

WinAddons belongs to one independent operator, who funds it, edits it and runs it. There is no media group above it, no chain, no network. There are no outside investors, no parent company, and no shareholder or partner outside the people producing the site. No part of it is owned by Microsoft, by any Microsoft partner, reseller, consultancy or managed service provider, by any hardware maker, software vendor, game studio or publisher, by any cloud provider, or by any fund with a position in the sectors we cover. No government body, political organisation or trade association holds any stake. Should any of this change, this page will change first, and conspicuously.

The operator’s name, company registration, governing jurisdiction and street address are not printed here, because details of that kind are harvested and reused by people impersonating publications to their readers. Anyone with a genuine need for them, whether to serve legal papers, to verify us for a transparency body or to vet us as an advertiser, can write to support@winaddons.com and will receive them in writing. Because the owner and the person running the site are the same, there is no proprietor to please and no one else to blame: if WinAddons publishes something it should not have, the owner published it.

No money from Microsoft

WinAddons is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft. We receive no payment, grant, credit, equipment, subscription or other consideration from Microsoft in exchange for anything. We are not a Microsoft partner, reseller or affiliate, we earn no commission on any Microsoft product or subscription, and no Microsoft programme membership carries obligations about our coverage. Where Microsoft or a studio supplies a review unit, a game code or a preview build, the supply is disclosed in the piece and it changes nothing about the verdict. If an advertisement for a Microsoft product appears on the site, it was placed by the advertising network’s automated auction, not by any arrangement between Microsoft and us, and it buys the same nothing that every other advertisement buys.

Where the money comes from

  • Display advertising. Advertisement units on the site’s pages are filled by a third-party advertising network that sells the space, serves the creative, measures it and passes us a share of the proceeds. That share is almost the whole of our revenue. What advertisers get is an audience, not an opinion: none is told what is coming, none is shown a draft, none has any lever on a story, and buying advertising has never shielded a company from critical coverage here.
  • Sponsored content, when present. Paid material, labelled as such and kept visibly and verbally apart from journalism, produced under our editorial standards and never written by the people who report the news. A piece without the label is not sponsored; there is no in-between category on this site.
  • Nothing else. No affiliate shop, no affiliate links, no paid links, no paid placements inside stories, no paywall, no reader payments. Any gap between advertising income and costs is met by the operator personally. If the mix ever changes, this page changes before the first new dollar arrives.

What the money cannot buy

  • Coverage. What we cover is picked on news value by the editorial side, and by nobody else.
  • Silence. No payment, made or merely hinted at, kills a story or blunts one.
  • Corrections or removals. The record gets repaired under our corrections policy on the evidence and on nothing else.
  • Review verdicts, rankings or a place in a comparison. None is for sale in any form.
  • Reader data. We do not sell it, as our privacy policy states.
  • An early look at editorial copy. No advertiser, sponsor or subject sees a story before it is published.

What we refuse

We turn away advertising that would compromise the publication or endanger the people reading it: creative that mimics a system alert, a security warning or an update prompt; software licences of doubtful legitimacy; tech-support and driver-updater schemes; and any deal whose real product is influence, a guaranteed editorial mention for a fee, for instance. The full list is on our advertise page. We also turn away investment from inside the industry we cover, on the principle that a publication funded by its subject becomes that subject’s newsletter. We hold no grants at present. We would consider a grant from a body that supports independent journalism, provided the funder had no say in coverage and the grant was disclosed on this page.

Contributors and conflicts

The operator pays the writers and editors. Freelancers are paid per piece, at a rate agreed before the work begins. Nobody writing for us is paid by anyone they write about, and before taking a story every contributor tells an editor about any connection to its subject, including past employment, holdings, partner programme memberships and consulting work, as our editorial standards require. Where a story touches a commercial relationship, the story discloses the relationship in its text. Disclosure is the minimum, not a substitute for independence; the whole arrangement is built so that there is seldom anything to disclose.

What we will disclose, and questions

If WinAddons changes hands, if an outside investor buys in, if we accept a grant, if we take money from Microsoft or from any company we cover, if we start selling advertising directly or add affiliate links, or if any new kind of revenue appears, this page will record it, with dates. Anyone wondering whether a commercial relationship sits behind a piece of coverage can ask at support@winaddons.com and will get a straight answer. A reader left wondering in silence costs us more than any advertiser pays.