SSM TourSmart Self-Managed Tours

Transparency

Advertising disclosure

Advertising is the only revenue source. This page states plainly where the ads are, what rules they follow, and what they are never allowed to touch.

Last updated 22 August 2026

What advertising never influences

Rankings. The importance score has exactly three inputs — Wikipedia sitelinks, pageview counts and heritage status — and no commercial term. No place has ever paid to be higher in a list, and there is no mechanism by which it could.

  • No sponsored place is presented as an editorial recommendation.
  • No affiliate booking link, on any page.
  • Nothing in a planner result is placed, weighted or reordered for money.

Where the slots are

Ad density is real — this is an advertising-funded site — but placement follows fixed rules so that reading is never interrupted.

Leaderboard
Directly under the header, above the article. Reserved at 100 px.
Sticky rail (desktop)
One 300 × 600 unit beside the content, viewable through the scroll.
In-content
Two or three units at section seams — after a ranked list, between editorial sections, before the FAQ.
End of page
One unit above the footer.
Anchor (mobile)
One dismissible 320 × 50 unit at the bottom edge. Never covers text.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Every slot reserves its exact height, so an ad that fails to fill shifts nothing on the page and the unfilled state is a designed state rather than a collapse.

  • Never inside a reading passage, and never between a heading and its first paragraph.
  • Never two units close enough to be on screen together on a phone.
  • No publisher-built pop-up or overlay over content you are reading. Google’s own vignette between page views, frequency-capped by Google, is the only interstitial.
  • Zero advertising in the print view of an itinerary.

If an ad ever appears somewhere that breaks one of these rules, that is a defect. Report it to [email protected] with the page and a screenshot and it will be fixed rather than defended.

Who serves them

Google AdSense, and nobody else. The publisher identifier lives in an environment variable, which means a fork or a preview deployment of this site serves no ads at all until it is set — advertising cannot be accidentally inherited.

Questions people ask

Why so many slots?

Because there is no other revenue: no subscription, no affiliate cut, no paid placement. The alternative to visible advertising is invisible advertising, and that is the one we refuse.

Can I pay to remove them?

Not today. If that ever exists it will be a plain subscription with no change to the rankings, because the rankings are not for sale in either direction.