Transparency
How this site is paid for
· Applies to loamnotes.com and every page on it
Rate Shock is free and has no paywall, no account and no subscription. It is funded by display advertising served through Google Ad Manager. On a site whose entire purpose is to show people what a loan really costs, how it earns its money is not a detail, so here it is in full.
The one rule
Nothing an advertiser pays for can change what the calculator computes or what the guides say.
Everything below follows from that. The advertising is bought programmatically through an auction; we do not sell space directly, we do not know in advance which advertisers will appear, and no advertiser has ever seen a guide before it was published or asked for one to be changed.
What we do not do
- No affiliate links and no referral fees. Not to banks, not to brokers, not to comparison sites. If this site ever paid us for sending you to a lender, its recommendations about lenders would be worthless, and so would the rest of it.
- No lead generation. Nothing you type is passed to anyone. The calculator does not transmit your figures at all, as described in the privacy policy.
- No sponsored content and no paid placement. No guide, no example and no bank named anywhere on this site was paid for. If that ever changes, the item will be labelled as sponsored at the top, in the same size type as the headline, and this page will say so.
- No bank rankings or “best loan” tables. Those formats are how comparison sites monetise, and they are the formats most easily bought.
- No advertising inside the results. The verdict, the headline figures and the analysis tables carry no ads. An advertisement next to a number that tells someone whether they can afford a house is a bad idea whatever it pays.
Where the advertising actually sits
| Page type | Placements |
|---|---|
| Guides, FAQ, glossary | One banner below the introduction, one unit after the article ends |
| The loan inspector | One unit below the results, outside the input panel and the analysis |
| Legal and policy pages | None |
Every unit is labelled “Advertisement” above the frame and its height is reserved before the creative loads, so an advertisement never pushes the paragraph you are reading down the page. There are no pop-ups, no interstitials, no auto-playing sound, no ads that follow you down the page, and no ad that can be mistaken for part of the analysis. If any advertisement here does any of those things, it is a fault: please report it through the contact page and we will block it.
What advertisers receive
Aggregate reporting only: how many times an advertisement was shown and clicked. We receive no personal data about you from Google, and Google receives none of your loan figures from us, because those never leave your device.
Advertising cookies and identifiers are denied by default and are only set if you allow them. If you refuse, ads are chosen from the content of the page rather than from anything about you. You can change that decision at any time: . The mechanics are in the cookie policy.
Financial advertising, specifically
Some advertisements on this site will be for financial products, including loans. That is uncomfortable on a site about the cost of loans, so it is worth being explicit:
- An advertisement is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or evidence that a product is any good. We do not choose the advertisers and we cannot vouch for them.
- We rely on Google’s policies for financial services advertising, which restrict what may be advertised and require licensing in many markets. That is a floor, not a guarantee.
- Apply the same arithmetic to an advertised offer that you would to one from a branch. An advertised rate on this site deserves exactly as much scepticism as an advertised rate anywhere else, and the loan inspector is right there.
- If you see an advertisement here that looks fraudulent, misleading about the cost of credit, or predatory, tell us. We will block the advertiser or the category. That has a revenue cost and it is the correct trade.
Our obligations as a publisher
Carrying Google advertising means agreeing to the Google Publisher Policies and the Google Ad Manager Partner Guidelines, and we take the parts that protect readers seriously: advertising is clearly distinguished from content, no page is built merely to hold advertising, the volume of advertising never exceeds the volume of content, and we do not encourage clicks on ads in any way. Enforcement is Google’s, but the standard is ours regardless of who is watching.
If this stops working
Advertising is the least intrusive way we could find to fund a tool that must never have a commercial interest in the answer it gives. If it ever fails to cover the cost of running the site, the alternatives we would consider are donations or a paid professional version for brokers and advisers. Affiliate revenue from lenders is not on the list and will not be.
Questions
Anything about advertising, sponsorship or a specific advertisement: support@regulad.com, or the contact page. How the content itself is produced and corrected is in the editorial policy.