How we make money
Some of the places on this site sell tickets, and on a few of those pages you will see a second button next to “Official site” that says something like “Book tickets”. If you buy after clicking it, we get a small cut from the ticket seller. You pay exactly the same either way.
What the money does not buy
This is the bit that matters, so it goes first. Commission has no say in what appears on kidzdays. It never has and it is not going to.
- Nobody pays to be listed. A venue that pays us nothing sits on the same page, in the same order, with the same write-up as one that pays.
- Nothing is ranked or sorted by whether we earn from it. The ordering rules are the same ones we would use if we earned nothing from anything.
- No write-up is softened. If a place is overpriced for what it is, or the car park is a rip-off, that stays in whether we have a link or not.
- Over half the days out on here are free, and they are the ones we push hardest, which is a strange way to run a business but a good way to run a family website.
The same promise as our listings page: nobody pays to be listed and nobody is left out for not paying.
Who actually pays us
Nobody, yet. We have no live affiliate links on the site at the moment. When that changes this table fills itself in automatically, so if it is empty, it is genuinely empty.
How to spot one
Every commission link says “We earn a commission” right next to the button, names the company, and says it before you click rather than after. They also carry the rel="sponsored" tag so search engines and browser tools can see them for what they are. If a link does not say it, we are not earning from it.
We do not call these adverts, because that is not what they are. Nobody has paid us to feature a place, to write about it kindly, or to put it further up a page. The venues on this site do not know we exist. All that happens is that if a booking you were making anyway starts from a link here, the ticket seller gives us a slice of their own margin. You pay the same either way.
Where the money goes
Half of everything these links earn pays for days out for families who could not otherwise afford one. That is the reason the links are here, not a nice line at the bottom of the page.
The honest position today: the site is new, the links earn nothing yet, and so nothing has been given away yet. We are not going to dress that up. Once money does come in we will publish what came in and where it went, on this page, so you can check rather than take our word for it.
Why we do it at all
Running this costs money: hosting, maps, the nightly job that re-checks a few hundred event feeds. The alternatives are charging venues to be listed, which decides what you get to see, or filling the pages with adverts, which makes them horrible to read. A cut of a ticket you were going to buy anyway seemed the least worst of the three. If you would rather not, use the “Official site” button instead. It is on every page and it is not tracked by anyone but the venue.
Questions, or think we have got the balance wrong? Email hello@kidzdays.co.uk.