Advertise With Us
We sell advertising because it pays for the reporting, and because we would rather take money from people who want to reach our readers than from people who want to shape what those readers are told. The rules are public so the conversation starts from the same place.
Who reads The Kissing Punk
People come to us for general news and stay for the beats: Auto, Business, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, News, Science, Sports, Tech and Travel. In practice that means a reader who reads a recall notice all the way down, who wants to know what a studio’s restructuring means for the game they preordered, and who checks the terms when an airline changes its compensation rules.
We do not publish inflated audience figures on a sales page or invent a demographic profile to make a deck look better. Ask us and we will send the current numbers out of our analytics, with the reporting period on them and the split by section and by country. Figures that would not survive a check against our own dashboard do not get sent at all.
What you can buy
Display placements across the site, run of network or targeted at particular sections, are the main thing we sell. Sponsorship of our email edition is a single-advertiser slot rather than a block of links. Sponsored articles are available under the labelling rules below.
We do not sell interstitials that cover the article, autoplaying audio, or creative built to look like one of our own headlines. Formats that make the journalism annoying to read cost us more in readers who never return than they earn in a quarter.
Sponsored content, and how it is labelled
Sponsored articles carry a label above the headline and a disclosure line naming the advertiser at the top of the body text. They are written by the advertiser or by writers commissioned outside the newsroom, never by the reporters who cover that sector. They get no review score, stay out of rankings and buying guides, and are kept out of the feeds we submit to aggregators.
The label stays on permanently. We do not quietly remove it when the campaign ends, and we do not let a sponsored piece be cited as our reporting. If a reader cannot tell within a second which pieces were paid for, the design is wrong and we want to hear about it.
What we will not take
Some of this is general and some of it comes with the sections we run. Motoring and gaming attract offers with conditions attached, lifestyle attracts health claims, and sport attracts betting money that would like to sit inside the match report.
We would rather say no early than take a booking and pull the creative in week two. If you are unsure which side of the line your campaign falls on, send it over and ask.
- Products sold on a false claim, including cures, guaranteed returns, and supplement or cosmetic advertising that makes a medical promise.
- Trading, crypto and short-term loan creative built on implied returns or hiding its costs behind a landing page.
- Political advocacy that will not name who paid for it.
- Betting creative that presents itself as tipping, and odds units placed inside sport reporting.
- Hosted trips, loan cars and review units offered on condition of a publication date, a score or an agreed angle.
- Content-recommendation widgets of the kind that fund most of the internet and embarrass everyone involved.
The firewall, in practice
Buying advertising gets you the placement. It does not get you a preview of coverage, a veto, a heads-up before a story about your company goes live, or a phone call with the reporter. If you pull a campaign because you disliked an article, that is your decision to make and the article will not change.
Commercial conversations are handled on the business side and never raised on the news list. Reporters are not told who advertises in their section. The standards our editors work to are published in full in our editorial standards, and the reasoning behind keeping the two sides apart is on our ownership and funding page.
Programmatic, data and privacy
Most display inventory is filled by the programmatic exchanges that serve the site, with category blocks applied at our end for everything refused above. Direct-sold campaigns are trafficked by us and can be kept off sections where the placement would be tasteless, which comes up more often than you would think.
Partners serving ads here have to meet the consent requirements that apply to our readers, and non-essential tags only fire after consent. What gets set, by whom and for how long is listed in our cookie policy, and the wider handling of reader data is in our privacy policy.
Booking, rates and reporting
Write to support@thekissingpunk.com with the sections you want, rough dates and a budget range, and ask for the rate card. We reply in two to three working days. Bookings are confirmed by email with the creative specs, the flight dates and the labelling terms where sponsored content is involved.
Reporting comes straight out of the ad server rather than retyped into a slide: impressions, clicks and viewability by placement, at the end of the flight and mid-flight on longer bookings. If your numbers disagree with ours, we will send the raw log and work out where the gap is.
