How we are funded

Where the money comes from

Some of this is running now and some of it is planned. Where something has not started yet, it says "will".

• Display advertising, which will run on the site.
• Paid listings. A business will be able to pay to have its listing show more: more photographs, its services, a direct link, a contact button.
• A local email newsletter, which will carry advertising.
• Shared leaflet campaigns, where several local businesses will split the cost of one printed drop.
• Websites. We build small websites for local businesses that do not have one.

What money does not buy

This is the part that matters, so it is stated plainly and it is enforced in the code rather than promised here.

• Position. Paying does not move a business up a page. Listings are ordered by rating, weighted by how many people rated them.
• Inclusion. Every business we can verify is listed whether it pays or not. Nobody buys their way onto the site and nobody is left off for not paying.
• Removal of a competitor. We will not take a business down because another business asked.
• Ratings. The ratings are Google's. We could not change them if we wanted to, and we would not.
• The information pages. Nothing on a crime, fuel, transport or bins page is sponsored, and they never will be.

How paid placement is marked

Advertising will be visibly marked as advertising. An enhanced listing will look different from a free one but sit in the same order as it would have anyway. If we ever run a piece of content somebody paid for, it will say so at the top, and any link in it will be marked so search engines can see it is paid.

Who we are not paid by

No council, police force, government body or trade association funds this site, and none has any say in what it publishes. We are not an affiliate of the businesses we list and we take no commission on any job that comes from a listing. When somebody clicks through to a business, we make nothing from it.

Conflicts of interest

nearbyuk is a trading name of Fixr Systems Ltd, and that same company builds websites for small businesses, including some that appear on this site. That is a real conflict of interest and this is where it gets declared: being a customer of Fixr Systems Ltd does not affect a listing's position, its content, or whether it appears at all.

Questions

If something on this site looks like it was paid for and is not marked as such, that is a fault worth telling us about: hello@nearbyuk.com.