Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

AnglerTrove may earn a commission when you buy something after following certain links from this site. It never costs you anything extra, and it never decides what we recommend.

What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link to a retailer that carries a tag identifying where the visit came from. If you buy something during that visit, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale.

You pay the retailer's normal price. The commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your pocket, and the price you see is the same price you would see arriving at that retailer any other way.

What it does not change

• It does not change what we recommend. Products are chosen for how well they suit a particular river, season, technique or situation. Whether a commission exists is not part of that decision.
• It does not change the price you pay. There is no markup, and no affiliate link on this site leads to a worse price than the retailer's own.
• It does not mean we were paid to say it. Nothing on this site is sponsored content, paid placement, or written to a brand's brief. If that ever changes, the page carrying it will say so plainly and in the same place as this disclosure.
• It does not make a retailer a partner of ours. Earning a commission through a public affiliate programme is not a partnership, an endorsement, or a relationship either side vouches for.

How recommendations are actually made

The full reasoning is set out in our editorial policy. In short: recommendations are based on usefulness and relevance to a specific fishing situation, and the basis for each one is stated so you can judge it yourself.

We do not claim to have personally tested the gear we recommend. Where a recommendation rests on published specifications, on what a category of product is designed to do, or on what a particular water demands of it, that is what the page will say. We would rather tell you the basis is reasoning than imply a field test that never happened.

Verify the details with the retailer

Product specifications, prices, sizing, materials, warranty terms and availability all change, and every one of them is the retailer's or the manufacturer's to state rather than ours. We do not hold stock, we do not set prices, and we are not told when a product is revised or discontinued.

Check the current details with the retailer or manufacturer before you buy. If something on this site describes a product differently from how the retailer describes it today, the retailer is right and we would appreciate being told so we can correct the page.

For the same reason, you will not find prices on our gear pages. A price written into an article is wrong within weeks, and a stale price is worse than no price because it looks like information.

Where these links appear

Affiliate links appear in gear recommendations and in editorial guides where a specific product is named. Any page carrying them shows a short disclosure at the top, above the first such link, rather than only at the foot of the page.

Affiliate links are marked up so that search engines can identify them as commercial, using the sponsored attribute that exists for exactly this purpose.

Which programmes we are part of

We do not list retailers or networks on this page. A programme is named only where a relationship is genuinely active and that programme's own terms permit us to name it, and we would rather say nothing than imply a relationship that is pending, expired or simply applied for.

You can always see where a link goes before you follow it, by reading the address in your browser's status bar or by long-pressing the link on a phone.

Cookies set by retailers

When you follow an affiliate link, the retailer or the network running their programme may set a cookie in your browser to remember that the visit came from us. That cookie is set by them on their own domain, under their own privacy policy, and we cannot read it.

What we see on our side is limited to the fact that a link was clicked, and later whether a sale was attributed to it. We do not receive your name, your address, your payment details or a list of what you bought. Our own privacy policy covers what we collect.

Our own products are not affiliate links

The Colorado Fly Fishing Playbook and the Skill Test report are our own products, sold directly. Buying either of those is a purchase from us, covered by our Terms and our refund policy, and has nothing to do with affiliate commission.

Why we do this at all

Commission is what allows river research to be published free to read. The alternative for a small independent site is usually advertising, which is worse for you, or putting everything behind a paywall, which defeats the point.

If a recommendation on this site ever reads as though it exists to earn a commission rather than to answer a question, tell us. That is a bug, and we will fix it.

Questions about this

The US Federal Trade Commission requires disclosures like this one to be clear and conspicuous, and we would rather over-explain than meet the bare minimum. If anything on this page is unclear, ask.