Since 2002, Pampered Puppy has existed for two equally important reasons: to inform consumers and discuss with them what upscale pet products/services are available to them (particularly those not available in big box stores), and to allow companies who make exciting, useful, unique and or/lovely products for pets a forum to reach out and let consumers know about their product.
Yes, companies send in their product for us to review - we do not pay for these products. 95% of the time, these products are unsolicited by our editorial staff (once in a blue moon, we see something we're excited about and ask if a review copy would be possible).
If, and ONLY if we feel the product is of good quality, we write and publish a review for the product. We do not review products we feel are sub-par quality; if we receive a product that is not suitable for review, we return the product to the company. This has not happened often, as we're lucky that quality companies want to work with us, but it has happened.
What happens to the products after we've reviewed them? About 50% of these products are donated to pug rescues throughout North America. We work with Pugalug Club Pug Rescue, Arizona Pug Adoption and Rescue Network, and Curly Tail Pug Rescue. The other 50% of products are kept on site for fashion shoots.
We did experiment briefly last year with paid, sponsored blog posts (that were marked clearly as such), but later abandoned this program because we felt it was compromising our editorial quality. While these posts remain in our Puppytrends blog, they are the only paid editorial content on the web site. Otherwise, all written content on the web site is straight up editorial - no companies pay us or otherwise coerce us to write about them. We write about the companies and products we're excited about, that we think are cool or pretty or useful or brilliant or all four, in some cases.
What constitutes advertising on our web site? Other than the few aforementioned sponsored blog posts, advertising on our web site is made up of:
Every ad on our web site or in our email newsletters is clearly marked as an advertisement or a sponsorship. And frankly, if we didn't have bills to pay around here, we'd stop displaying ads altogether. The one thing we CAN promise you is relevant advertising as much as possible; way back before Google made it cool, we were turning away advertisers if their products didn't match our readership, and we still do that today.
Our shopping area is not advertising per se. We wanted a way to give you, our readers, a one-stop-shop place to find really great upscale pet stuff. We have a business partnership with a dozen or so pet retailers to display their products in our Shopping area; every product in there links back to ther retailer. If you decide to buy from them, we get a portion of the sale. But even here, our editorial choices prevail; we don't get better kickbacks for promoting certain items. We choose the items to feature in the Shopping area based on what WE love, what WE buy for our dogs.
Back in 2002 when PamperedPuppy.com began, you didn't worry so often about people being dishonest when running a web site like ours; that's one of the reasons why this editorial POLICY has been in place since day one, but just never written on the web site. For eight years we've worked our "tails" off to make sure that you had an ethically-driven reading and buying experience. That hasn't changed, nor is it going to.
© Pampered Media Corporation 2002-2010. All rights reserved.