Advertising and affiliate disclosure
BreakAtlas carries no advertising and no commission links today. This page states what is planned, and the rules that will apply the moment that changes.
· Written in plain English on purpose
Current status: no ads, no sponsors, no commission links. Nothing on this site pays us at the date shown above. This page exists so the rules are on record before the first dollar arrives, rather than written to fit it afterwards.
The one rule that outranks the others
Money never moves a number. Wave heights, water temperatures, tide predictions, rip current wording and beach hazard information are produced from agency data and are decided before any question of revenue arises. No commercial relationship has ever caused a reading to be adjusted, a hazard to be softened, or a spot to be added, ranked or hidden — and no future one will.
Safety content stays free of paid placement entirely. A page describing rip currents will not carry a product recommendation next to the part that tells you how to get out of one.
How BreakAtlas is meant to pay for itself
Running this site costs money — hosting, domains, and the daily compute that rebuilds every report. Three sources are planned, in the order they are likely to arrive:
| Source | Status | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Gear commission links (wetsuits, boards, accessories) | Planned, not active | If you buy through one, the retailer pays us a share. Your price is unchanged. |
| Display advertising | Planned, not active | Ad slots in fixed positions, never inside a safety section. |
| Sponsored articles, paid reviews, paid spot placement | Excluded on principle | None will be accepted. There is no rate card, because there is nothing for sale. |
How a paid link is marked
Federal Trade Commission guidance requires that a material connection between a publisher and a seller be disclosed clearly and close to the recommendation — not buried in a policy page like this one. So every commission link on this site will carry all three of the following:
- a visible label at the link itself, in the same view, before you click;
- the HTML attribute
rel="sponsored nofollow", so search engines and AI systems can tell too; - a plain statement on the page that a purchase may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.
A link with no label is not a paid link. Where a page recommends a piece of equipment and earns nothing from it, nothing is labelled, because there is nothing to disclose.
How gear recommendations are made
Recommendations follow the water temperature and the conditions, and they start from what the data says a person needs — the wetsuit thickness for 58 °F, for example, is a function of the reading, not of which brand pays the most. Commission rates are not a selection criterion, and a product will not be recommended because it is available through a program we happen to belong to.
Where we have not tested something ourselves, the page says so. Building daily report sites from agency data is the expertise here, and it is stated plainly on the About page rather than dressed up as gear testing that never happened.
Advertising and your data
No ad script runs on this site today, and no cookie is set for advertising purposes. If an ad network is added, the privacy policy and the cookie notice are updated before the first script ships, the network is named, and visitors in regions that require a consent choice receive one.
Editorial independence
BreakAtlas is independent of every agency, forecasting service and surf brand it mentions. Nobody outside the operator sees a page before it is published, and no advertiser has right of review over anything. If that ever changes, it will be stated here first.
Questions
If a labelled link looks unclear to you, or a recommendation reads as if something was bought, say so: info@breakatlas.com. That kind of report is worth more than the commission it costs.
Operated by Honeygoat GmbH · Legal notice