How this site makes money, and what that does not buy
Last reviewed 19 August 2026.
Current status: This page carries no partner links and no ticket seller has paid for placement on it. If that ever changes, the disclosure will appear next to the link itself, not in a footer.
That line is generated from the site's own configuration rather than typed by hand, so it cannot drift out of step with what the pages actually carry.
The four ways money reaches this site
1. Display advertising. Provo.com runs Google AdSense. Those are ads served by Google, they look like ads, and no advertiser in that system has any relationship with us or any influence over what we write.
2. Paid directory placements. Featured Partners and Wedding Vendors pay a
monthly fee to appear in their category. Every one of those cards carries a visible
Sponsored label inside the card itself, and the link carries
rel="sponsored". Paying puts a business in the directory. It does not buy a
recommendation in an article, and it has never once changed a sentence of editorial copy.
3. Paid listings. Real-estate listings and housing-contract listings are paid submissions from the person selling. They are listings, not endorsements, and Provo.com is never in the payment path between a buyer and a seller.
4. Partner links. Some links may earn Provo.com a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing extra. Where such a link exists, the disclosure sits immediately beside it — not here, and not in a footer.
Why the disclosure is beside the link and not only on this page
Because a disclosure only on a policy page does not meet the standard. The FTC's Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, at 16 C.F.R. Part 255, define "clear and conspicuous" at § 255.0(f) as a disclosure that is difficult to miss and, in an interactive medium such as a website, unavoidable. Example 9 under § 255.0(g) rejects the two common shortcuts by name: a disclosure carried only on a profile page is not clear and conspicuous because people seeing the content could easily miss it, and a disclosure hidden behind a "more" link is not unavoidable when the content itself is visible without clicking.
Section 255.5(b), Example 11 describes our exact situation: a blogger who writes independently of the manufacturers but includes affiliate links and receives a portion of each sale. The Guides' conclusion is that the compensation should be disclosed clearly and conspicuously in the reviews.
So this page is a backstop and an explanation. It is not the disclosure. The disclosure is next to the link.
What we will not do
We will not sell rankings. Section 255.4(b)(3)(i) is explicit that a review site accepting payment in exchange for higher rankings is deceptive regardless of disclosure, because the payment determines the order. No "best of" list on this site is ordered by who paid, and no amount of money will change that.
We will not write a recommendation we do not hold. Under § 255.1(a) an endorsement must reflect the honest opinion of the endorser. Where we have not measured something, we say so rather than filling the gap with a confident number.
We will not put Provo.com in a transaction. For tickets, housing contracts and classifieds alike, the money moves between the two parties or through a third-party marketplace. We refer and we explain; we do not take payments or hold funds.
If you find a link without a disclosure
That is a defect, not a policy, and we would like to know. The site runs an automated check
(scripts/affiliate.py) that fails the build when a partner link ships without a
disclosure beside it, or when a page carries such a link while claiming it does not — but a check
can only catch what it can see in the markup. Tell us and we will fix it.