Advertising policy feature image

Advertising policy

Version: 18 July 2019

Why does Canstar have advertisements?

Canstar is committed to offering comprehensive information to consumers for free.

To generate this quality information we employ 170 staff with extensive experience in financial services, and we run large computer systems. This costs millions of dollars every year, and advertising is one of the ways we pay for this.

We also want consumers to be aware of good offers in the marketplace and see this as part of the service we offer.

We run third party paid advertisements across our website and in electronic direct mail.

Doesn’t this create a conflict of interest for you?

In many ways we are similar to a quality newspaper. We have outstanding researchers (equivalent to journalists) that publish quality material. Separately to this, we have a team that sells advertisements.

Just as quality newspapers take their journalism very seriously and separate the commercial side, Canstar takes its research very seriously and goes to great pains to ensure that our results are not biased in any way. Researchers don’t sell advertising.

We clearly identify advertisements and ‘Sponsored and Promoted links’ and do not have ‘advertorials’

What sort of advertisements do you allow?

We only allow quality advertisements that are relevant to consumers. If we don’t have a quality advertisement we’ll use the space to talk about Canstar developments and news rather than run irrelevant ads.

How else do you get paid?

Canstar earns money to pay for its research in a range of ways. A full description is included here.
A more formal description is included in our Canstar financial services guide.
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