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Our Editorial Policy
Last Updated July 1, 2008 The industry has been blasted recently with claims of editorial misconduct, advertising dollars artificially inflating review scores, and one famous case where an employee was allegedly termated due to an unfavourable review score (where the publisher had invested a hefty sum of advertising money). Given these events, we feel it's important to clarify our position on advertising and our editorial independence here at GamingExcellence. Full Disclosure on Advertising Advertising on our publication is handled independently of our editorial division. In fact, we manage it through a parent company called Auracore MediaWorks. For full editorial disclosure, I am the only person with dual roles at both GamingExcellence and our parent company. Being in a position of power, I'm well aware of the potential conflict of interest, and keep this in the top of my mind whenever I move between the two divisions. Given our size, this dual role is unavoidable, but I'm absolutely positive to never allow my duties with our parent company to impact our editorial content, or influence any of our journalists in one way or another. What Forms of Advertising Do We Allow? Traditional banner ads of varying dimensions around the site, takeover advertisements on our homepage, event and contest sponsorships, and our ProfilesPlus program (more on that later). In terms of event sponsorships, just to clarify these are never sponsored by game companies. For example, our overall E3 coverage could be sponsored by a soft drink company, but never a game publisher or developer. If it could even be considered an editorial conflict of interest on a major event sponsorship, we will pass on the opportunity to protect our editorial integritiy. Editorial Independence We keep our editorial division separate to maintain our journalistic freedom - we represent the consumer. If a game is terrible, no amount advertising revenue is going to change that. Not only would it violate the trust we've been given by our readers, it would be completely unethical and a blatent disregard of the people who we represent. So you're probably wondering, why are some of our game profiles themed? This is a new advertising initiative our parent company is taking on to provide a bit more exposure on a particular game. This does not affect editorial content on our website in any way, reviews, previews, features, news, or otherwise. What Does This Mean? We are theming profiles to add an additional source of revenue for our parent company, called our ProfilesPlus program. What does this mean from a consumer perspective? We may have a larger gallery of media and screenshots for a game with a themed profile, and it guarantees inclusion of that game into our database. None of the editorial content is paid for or influenced by advertising, including that on these themed profiles. Ever. From an advertising perspective, the idea is to boost traffic to the official website (many of these profiles will have a link back to the official website), and increase it's exposure across our publication. That's it. We Will Never Have Any Paid or Advertising Influenced Editorial Content. Period. Our review scores are in no way influenced by advertising on our publication. This includes profiles that are themed as part of the ProfilesPlus program. While we require advertising to be sustainable, losing the trust of our audience would be incredibly unethical and destroy our credibility, which is all that is truly important in this business. We do not permit paid editorial content anywhere on GamingExcellence, nor will we ever allow editorial content to be influcenced by external sponsorship. That's our commitment to you. |
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