How We Make Money

The short version

Scope & Sky is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

If you click a buy button here and go on to buy something, we receive a small commission from the retailer. You pay exactly the same price either way. The commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket.

Why commission cannot move a ranking here

Every site with affiliate links promises editorial independence. Here is the concrete mechanism behind the promise, so you do not have to take it on faith.

Every ranking on this site is ordered by computed aperture per dollar, followed by mount stability, out-of-box usability, and honest optical execution. Those are the four criteria published on the methodology page, and the first of them is arithmetic on two numbers: the manufacturer’s published aperture, and the live retail price.

No commission rate changes how much light a mirror collects. A telescope cannot be moved up a list here by paying more, because its position is derived from figures neither we nor the retailer control. That is a structural constraint rather than a policy, and it is checkable: the formulas are published and the inputs are linked on every page.

What we do not accept

• No free products. Nothing on this site was sent to us. We have not received a telescope, an eyepiece or an accessory from any manufacturer or retailer.
• No paid placements. No brand has paid to appear here, to appear higher, or to have a competitor removed. Sponsored placements: 0.
• No sponsored content. Nothing on this site was written for or reviewed by a manufacturer.
• No affiliate program we have not joined. Every buy link here goes to Amazon. We do not build tracking links for programs we are not part of.

How the links work, technically

Every buy button points at an on-site address of the form /go/<product>, which redirects to the retailer with our Amazon Associates tracking tag scopeandsky-20 attached.

The redirect exists so that the destination for each product lives in one configuration entry rather than being scattered through the writing. If a better retailer becomes available for a product later, that is a one-line change and no article has to be rewritten. Those addresses carry noindex headers and are excluded from our sitemap and disallowed in robots.txt, because they are plumbing rather than pages.

Outbound commercial links carry rel="sponsored nofollow", which is what Google’s link-spam policy asks of any link that exists because of a commercial relationship.

Where the disclosure appears

FTC guidance asks for disclosure that is clear and conspicuous at the point of the link, rather than only on a policy page like this one. So a short disclosure renders above the first buy button on every page that carries one, and an #ad marker sits under every individual buy button, including the ones showing “Check price” rather than a figure.

About the prices

Prices on this site come from a live data layer refreshed daily and are stamped with the date they were checked. Prices change constantly and the figure on the retailer’s page at the moment you click is the one that applies. Where our data layer has nothing fresh, the button reads “Check price” rather than showing a number we cannot stand behind.

Questions

If anything on this page is unclear, or you think a specific recommendation looks commercially motivated, say so: info@scopeandsky.com. Scope & Sky is published by Slate Mill Group.