Ownership and Funding

Who owns this site

Oton Technology is independently owned and operated. It is not part of a media group, it is not owned by a technology company, and no advertiser, vendor or investor holds equity in it or any form of editorial control over it. There is no parent company whose commercial interests sit behind the coverage.

How it is funded

The site is funded by advertising displayed alongside articles. Advertising is sold as space, not as coverage. Advertisers do not see articles before publication, cannot commission them, cannot prevent them, and receive no protection from critical reporting about their products or their companies. An advertiser who asks for any of these things is told no, and if they persist the arrangement ends.

We do not publish sponsored posts dressed as editorial. Where any commercial content appears it is labelled clearly enough that no reasonable reader could mistake it for reporting. Details of how advertising works here are on the advertising page.

Affiliate arrangements

Some links to products may earn the site a commission if a reader buys through them. Where that applies it is disclosed on the article. A commission never determines whether a product is covered, how it is assessed, or what conclusion an article reaches. We do not adjust a verdict because one product pays a commission and another does not, and we publish negative assessments of products that carry affiliate links.

What we do not take

We do not accept payment to publish, to remove, or to alter an article. We do not accept payment for links inside editorial text, which is a large and persistent market in technology publishing and one we stay out of entirely. We do not take gifts of value from companies we cover. Review hardware is either returned or disclosed, and its provision never carries conditions about the conclusions we reach.

There are no undisclosed arrangements behind anything published here. If a relationship exists that a reasonable reader would want to know about when judging an article, it appears in that article.

Editorial control

Editorial decisions rest with the newsroom and nowhere else. Commercial operations are kept separate from editorial work as a matter of structure rather than goodwill. The rules the newsroom follows are set out in our Editorial Standards, and the way we handle our own mistakes is set out in the Corrections Policy. Both are published so that readers can hold us to them.