Sponsorship Criteria

Hello! If you’re reading this, you’ve contacted The New Oil about a potential brand partnership (or you’re a reader who wants to verify our guidelines for yourself, in which case welcome and good on you for being a critical thinker!). Unfortunatley, TNO gets a lot of requests for sponsorship that we are in no way a good fit for. So to save everyone some time, please review the criteria below. These criteria are indicative of the kinds of brands that would be a good fit for our audience. If after reading these questions you still think that we’d be a good fit to work together, please feel free to reach out again and let us know. Thanks for your understanding!

• Our audience: One of the most common questions we get from interested brand partners is “What’s your audience look like?” You can see realtime analytics about our website visitors here. We are unable to publish YouTube (or overall video) or blog stats publicly at this time, but are happy to provide those upon request. However, this page - combined with already publicly-available information (such as visible subscriber and view counts) should give you a rough idea of our audience and reach.

• We only accept partners for the website, videos and/or blog posts. We do not accept sponspored content for the news feed. See the additional notes below for more information on this format.

• Is your service/website privacy-respecting? We understand that usually some amount of data collection is required to provide a service/product or ensure a smooth user experience, however we expect that your service/product does not collect an unnecessary amount of data and does not share or sell data for targeted advertising. Sharing with a valid court order is expected.

• Is your target audience B2C? The New Oil’s target audience is non-techy consumers. If your target audience is enterprise or B2B, we are not the right partner for your brand. Thank you for your interest.

• Can you explain your service/product to a child? The New Oil’s target audience is non-techy consumers. If you cannot explain your service/product (or what makes it unique from the competition) without deep, technical explanations or jargon, its probably not a good fit for our target audience.

• Is your service/product user-friendly for non-techies? The New Oil’s target audience is non-techy consumers. We expect our readers & viewers to be able to download an app, create an account, and understand the basic settings. If your service/product expects users to do things like hook into an API, self-host, or compile (or other things that you wouldn’t expect any reasonable person off the streets to be able to do without experience or training), it’s probably not a good fit for our target audience.

• Why should users/customers trust your service/product? Is your service/product open source? Has it been audited? Have you published a detailed white paper? What reason have you given users to trust the security and promises of your service/product aside from “trust me, bro, we hired a guy.” (If a non-tech product, the same general question still applies: “why should customers not assume this is some flash-in-the-pan scam that won’t be around in a few years if they need help, a replacement, etc?”)

Additional Notes

Here is some additional information about how we handle brand partnerships:

• Partners are not required to strictly meet the same criteria as other listings on the website (though it is encouraged). However, they are still expected to demonstrate alignment with The New Oil’s mission and values: accessible, genuine privacy and cybersecurity for individual users. Sponsors are expected to reasonably demonstrate that their services and products are in keeping with The New Oil’s Mission Statement.

• Video/Blog sponsors may not sponsor specific content (ex, “we want to write a guest blog post”) regardless of the content itself. Additionally, sponsors may not request that their ad be placed at or in a specific time period or selection of a video/blog post. All sponsored content will be at the start of the blog/video (no later than just after the introduction) and at the end just before the outro for videos and after the post for blogs. Website sponsors will have their logo and a brief description placed in the navigation bar that will be visible at nearly all times while a reader is browsing. Tracking links are permitted only for the purpose of monitoring how much traffic is coming from The New Oil to gauge the effectiveness of the sponsorship. Sponsors are expected not to collect additional unnecessary information (see the first bullet point above).

• If a partner believes something we said is factually incorrect, they may reach out to us with corrected information and we will happily issue a public correction. We reserve the right to ask them more questions and ask for evidence of their claims.

• All potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed by The New Oil up front at the appropriate place and time (e.g. content related to VPN services would say at the beginning “[VPN Service] is one of our sponsors”).

• Partners may not sponsor a review, blog post, video, or any other content about the same topic for which they provide a service or product (e.g. a VPN service cannot sponsor a blog post about VPNs, even if it’s a review of a different provider or a post about VPNs in general).

• Partners will not have any editorial control over The New Oil or any of our content. We reserve the right without exception to discuss any public information about the partner including but not limited to news, regardless if positive or negative (ex for Surveillance Report, such as a data breach or a major new feature) or limitations of the partner’s product/service (ex “no, it does have that feature”).