How we make money

1 · Referral fees on some links

When you click certain links here and go on to register, book, or buy, the company on the other end pays us a small referral fee. It never costs you anything extra — the price is the same as it would be if you had typed the address in yourself.

Today that means two things:

• Race registration links. Where a race registers through RunSignup, our "Register" button carries a referral code. The fee is a small share of the platform's processing charge — small enough that it could never buy anything, which is why we treat it as a rounding error rather than a business. Races that register anywhere else get a plain link that earns us nothing, and we link them exactly the same way.
• The lodging map on race pages, which is provided by Stay22. If you book somewhere through it, we may receive a commission on that booking. The map appears wherever we have verified coordinates for a race, regardless of whether anything there earns — and the same disclosure sits next to the map itself.
• Gear mentioned in articles. Where a story is genuinely about equipment — a trail guide that assumes you own a headlamp, say — we may link the product category on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We link a category or search page rather than pushing a specific product we haven't tested, at most one per article, and most articles have none. A gear link never decides which races an article covers or what order they appear in.

As we add others — running gear and travel programs are the likely next ones — they follow the same rules and this page gets updated in the same change. Links that pay us are marked up as sponsored links so search engines can see the relationship too.

2 · Clearly labeled paid placement

Race directors can pay to feature a race, brands can sponsor a placement, and charity teams can pay to duplicate their listing higher on the page. Every one of those is a labeled card that sits outside the ranked lists, carries no rank number, and contains no tracking script. The full terms, including what advertising here cannot buy, are on the advertise page.

Charity listings themselves are free and editorial. Paying only ever duplicates a listing — it never reorders one.

What none of this can buy

This is the part that matters, and it is enforced in the database rather than by good intentions: no payment, claim, or commission can change a race's score, its rank order, which lists it appears in, or whether it shows a verified badge. The scoring formula is published in full and computed from public data every time the site builds.

That extends to travel and charity work the same way. What we earn on a hotel booking has no bearing on which races we rank or where the lodging map renders, and we take no cut of any charity donation — donation buttons link out to the charity's own page, and the money never passes through us.

No tracking, including here

Referral links are the one commercial thing on the page, and they are just links: the referral code is written into the address when the site is built, so there is no ad script, no pixel, and no cookie set by us to make it work. We do not know who clicked what. The trade-off is that we measure these programs from the partners' own dashboards instead of by watching you, which is the trade we would make anyway. The details are on the privacy page.

Questions

If something here looks wrong or unclear, say so: [email protected]. Corrections to this page get made the same way corrections to a race listing do.