Affiliate disclosure
Some links on this site pay us a commission when you sign up. It costs you nothing, and it has no effect on our rankings, ratings or which platforms we cover.
How this site makes money
The Side Hustle Journal is free to read and carries no display advertising. We make money in one way: when a reader signs up to a platform through one of our links, that platform pays us a commission. It comes out of the platform’s customer-acquisition budget, not out of your earnings. Your sign-up bonus, your rate and your terms are identical whether you arrive through us, through Google, or by typing the address directly.
We currently work with MaxBounty and with a number of platforms’ own affiliate programmes.
How to tell which links are which
- Rust-coloured button — affiliate link. We may earn a commission.
- Outlined teal button — not an affiliate link. We earn nothing.
- Plain text links inside articles — internal links to our own pages. No commission.
Every affiliate link carries rel="sponsored nofollow", which declares the relationship to search engines as well as to you. Every page with an affiliate link also carries a disclosure notice above the fold, not buried in the footer — because a disclosure you have to hunt for is not a disclosure.
The bit most disclosures leave out
Several of our top-rated platforms pay us nothing. Not as a gesture — because they do not run affiliate programmes, or we have not been approved, or the programme does not cover the countries we write for. Where that is the case they still get ranked on merit and still get a plain, unpaid link.
Our entire AI side hustles section — the highest-paying category on this site — has almost no affiliate programmes available. We publish it anyway, because it pays the most. If our rankings were built around commissions, the top of every list would look very different. That is the test, and you can run it on any page.
Our avoid sections contain no affiliate links at all. Ever. Monetising a warning would make the warning worthless, and the warning is the most useful thing we publish.
What commissions never affect
- Ranking order — determined by weighted scoring, which is arithmetic, not judgement
- Ratings and sub-scores — derived from logged sessions
- Which platforms we cover — we review what people are searching for, not what pays best
- What we say — our review of a platform we monetise will still tell you if the minimum cashout is unreasonable
- Whether something goes on the avoid list — a paying platform that stops paying its users goes on that list and loses us the revenue
What we do not do
- No paid placements. You cannot buy a spot in a ranking here.
- No paid reviews and no sponsored rankings.
- No pre-publication review by any platform, network or advertiser.
- No incentivised sign-ups. We never offer you a bonus or reward for using our links. Beyond being against our networks’ terms, it would corrupt the only thing we are selling, which is an honest opinion.
Cookies and tracking
When you click an affiliate link the destination platform typically sets a cookie so it can attribute the sign-up to us. We also append two tracking parameters to our own outbound links so we can see which page and which position a click came from — that is how we learn what is useful, and it contains no personal information about you. We do not sell data and our newsletter list is never shared.
Not financial advice
Nothing on this site is financial, tax or legal advice, and we are not financial advisers. We report what we measured and what platforms’ terms say. Earnings vary enormously by country, demographics and time invested. Bank account bonuses are generally taxable income in the US — check your own position, and consider speaking to a professional for anything consequential.