The Motherhood Diary · Affiliate & Sponsorship Disclosure

Version 0.2 · Effective: [EFFECTIVE DATE] · Applies to: The Motherhood Diary blog, The Mama Who Knew newsletter, our social accounts, and Den of Mamas, run by Motherhood Diary Media Company, [COMPANY ADDRESS] · Questions: [CONTACT EMAIL]

In plain words

Some of the links in our recipes earn us a small commission if you buy something, and the price you pay is the same either way. When a brand has paid for a post or an ad, we say so at the top, before you read a word. Every brand we work with answered the same five questions first, and none of them gets a say in what we write.

Den of Mamas carries one kind of advertisement and only one: a card in the feed of one Local Den, sold to a business in that area. The only thing it knows about you is which Den you are in. Nothing you write there, and nothing you are going through, is ever used to sell you anything.

1. What this page covers

This page explains how The Motherhood Diary earns money from brands, and how you will always know when it is happening.

There are four places a brand can appear, and they are the only four:

It does not cover what happens on a brand's own website after you click, which is theirs.

It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which says what we hold about you, and our Terms of Service, which say what you agree to when you join. We wrote it the way we would explain it to a friend at the kitchen table.

2. What an affiliate link is

An affiliate link is an ordinary link with a small difference. If you click it and buy something, the shop pays us a small commission. You pay the same price you would have paid anyway. Nothing is added to your bill, and nothing is taken from it.

You will find these links on the Blog, mostly in recipes: an ingredient that is hard to track down, or a tool we reach for every week. We link to things we actually use in our own kitchen. Where a post has one or more of these links, it is labelled at the top (see section 3). There are no affiliate links in Den of Mamas, in any post, comment or message.

We take part in [AFFILIATE NETWORKS]. Some networks ask us to say a specific sentence. Where they do, it appears on the post as well as here.

3. How you will know

3.1 The three labels

Every post that involves money from a brand carries one of three labels. These are the exact words, and there are no others. They are the three the publishing system records against a post.

If a brand ever sends us something for free and we write about it, that counts too. We will say so at the top, in the same place and the same size. [PLACEHOLDER: gifted products and samples are not yet a label the publishing system knows about. Confirm whether the company accepts them at all, and if so what the label says.]

3.2 Where the label sits

On the Blog, the label is the first thing on the post. It sits above the headline, above the byline, and above the first line of writing, in plain text at the same size as the words around it, and it carries a link to this page. It is never hidden behind a "more" link, tucked into a footnote, or left for the bottom of the page.

This is not just our preference. We understand the Federal Trade Commission to require that a paid relationship be made clear before you engage with the post, in a way you cannot miss. That understanding is one of the things the attorney is asked to confirm below.

The same rule follows us everywhere else:

• The Mama Who Knew newsletter. If an issue has a sponsor, the word Sponsored opens the sponsored section, before the first line of it. One sponsor per issue, and no more — the system refuses to sell the same issue twice. The letter's sponsor position stays locked until the list reaches 2,000 subscribers.
• Social accounts. The label is the first line of the caption, before any fold, and we switch on the platform's own paid-partnership tag as well.
• Ad spaces on the blog. The ad carries the word Advertisement with the brand's name, on the ad itself. There are four positions and no others: below the header on the homepage and section pages; beside the article; further down the sidebar; and, on recipe pages only, one between the steps. No ad appears on a community story at all — not beside one, not between its paragraphs. And no position renders anything until a partner has signed and paid for it: an unsold position is not an empty box or a house ad, it is nothing at all.
• In Den of Mamas. Sponsored · Local to [Den] across the top of the card, in the Den's own type, never smaller than body text. Section 6 sets out every other rule that card lives under.

3.3 If a label goes missing

A post with a paid relationship cannot be published without its label. That is refused in the database, not checked in a screen, so there is no path around it.

If a label is later found missing on a live post, the post leaves public view until it is fixed, and it appears as a blocking item on that partner's record. In the Den, if the Sponsored label fails to render, the card is pulled and the same blocking item is raised on the advertiser's record. None of this is a setting, and it cannot be switched off, by Makenna or anyone else.

4. How we choose partners

We sell trust, not attention. The right partner should feel like a recommendation from a friend who knows you. So every brand, whether it pays a fee or a commission or buys a card in a Den, answers the same five questions before anything begins:

1. Would Makenna genuinely use this with her own children?
2. Does the brand serve an existing content pillar? News for families, recipes, or the stories of this community. A brand that maps to none of them does not fit here.
3. Will the community feel grateful for the introduction?
4. Has the brand agreed in writing that content is never influenced? For an affiliate this means accepting an honest write-up, including a lukewarm one, as a condition of the link.
5. Are they comfortable with full, prominent disclosure?

A single "no" ends the conversation, and no rate is reachable until qualification is finished.

Some brands never reach the questions. These categories are refused outright, and they are held as a list in the system rather than as a memory:

• Diet culture, weight loss, and anything aimed at a mother's body
• Direct sales and multi-level marketing, or anything the buyer must recruit others to profit from
• Payday and predatory lending
• Alcohol, gambling, firearms
• Political campaigns and issue advocacy
• For a Local Den card only: anything that is not a real local business with a real address or service area

We also do not work with any brand whose values conflict with our community standards. [PLACEHOLDER: two further refusals are written into the playbook but are not in the system's list — brands contradicting evidence-based health guidance, and financial products without regulatory framing. Confirm whether they are added to the list or removed from this page.]

One more promise. For every post that carries a partner, there are at least three that carry none. The system counts affiliate posts, sponsored posts, ad-carrying pages and live Local Den cards together against that ratio, and it refuses to schedule a paid post that would break it. The feed should never feel bought, because it is not.

5. What a partner never gets to do

No partner reads a post before it is published. No partner changes a word after. No partner chooses what we write about, or when.

If we try a product and think it is fine but not wonderful, we say fine but not wonderful. A lukewarm review stays lukewarm. Every affiliate and every sponsor accepts that as a condition of working with us, in writing, before we begin. A brand that wants a guaranteed glowing write-up is welcome to go elsewhere.

No partner sees you, either. What a partner is given is written down where they can read it, and it is short:

Nothing from Den of Mamas ever reaches a partner: no member, no post, no comment, no message. Section 6 says what a Local Den advertiser gets instead, and it is a set of daily totals.

6. Advertising in Den of Mamas

The Den carries advertising. One kind, and only one:

A card in the feed of one Local Den, for a term, sold to a business local to that Den.

A bakery, a pediatric dentist, a swim school, a photographer. Somebody who is actually down the road. It is part of how the Den stays free.

This reverses an earlier decision that the Den would carry no advertising at all, and the reasoning behind that decision has not been argued with — it is what every rule below is built out of. The Den is where mothers say the hard things: grief, fear, the nights that did not go well. So the Den sells local reach, and it never sells a vulnerable moment.

What the card knows about you. Which Den you are in. That is the whole of it. There is no targeting by life stage, by anything you have written, by anything you have read, by keywords, by behaviour, by lookalike audience, or by retargeting. No third-party data comes in, and none goes out. This is not a promise held in place by policy: the advertising code runs as a database role that has no read at all on members, posts, comments, messages, holds, or anything carrying a life stage. It can see campaigns, creatives, the Dens, the daily totals, and a count of how many members a Den has. That is its whole world.

What runs. Nothing of theirs. No ad-tech kit, no pixel, no third-party script ever executes inside the Den. The card is a photograph the advertiser took, a business name, up to two sentences, a call to action of two to four words, and a link, served by us from our own servers.

How it is counted. On our own servers, first-party, as daily totals for each campaign in each Den — impressions, clicks and paused days. Never per member. There is no record anywhere of which mother saw which card, because there is no table to write one to. Which card is shown to whom on a given day is worked out and forgotten.

Where a card is never allowed.

• Never in the first three positions of the feed.
• Never more often than one card per ten ordinary posts. Makenna can make that sparser. Nothing can make it denser.
• Never directly above or below a help request, an anonymous post, a post the grief-and-loss filter matched, or an event thread.
• Never inside a thread, in Messages, in notifications, on a profile, in search, in the composer, at sign-up, on the Community Standards page, or anywhere near a crisis check-in. There is no slot on any of those surfaces to switch off, because none was built.
• Paused across the whole Den for 48 hours around each dedication day. The term extends by the paused days automatically, so the advertiser is not shorted and does not have to ask.
• Never to a member for 30 days after a crisis flag, or while a help request of hers is open. The advertising code is told only "not now" — never why. The advertiser is never told a card was withheld; their reach figure simply reads a little lower.

What you can do with any card. Three things, on every one:

• "Why am I seeing this?" — which answers, in one line: Because you're in the [Den] Den. That's the only reason.
• Hide this ad. We remember that, on your own record, so it is not shown to you again. No advertiser can read it.
• Report this ad. One of the reasons is simply "This ad shouldn't be here." It goes to Makenna like any other report.

How a business buys one. At /advertise, linked from the Blog footer and never from inside the Den — members do not see a door marked "buy ads." The application gives the business details, the Den or Dens, the term in months, the creative, and a card authorisation. The card is authorised, not charged. The application goes into the same pipeline as every other partner, with the same 48-hour response clock and the same five questions. Nothing renders until Makenna has approved it. Approval captures the payment; a decline releases the authorisation and nothing is taken. Before it reaches her, the creative passes the same rules engine that reads members' posts.

What the advertiser gets back. A monthly report by email: impressions, clicks, click rate, paused days, and members reached as a count rounded to the nearest ten — withheld entirely, as "fewer than 25," when the number is smaller than that. Plus a written note from Makenna. Never a member, never a list, never which mother saw anything, never another advertiser's figures, and nothing from the community. There is no advertiser login. Advertisers do not join the Den, cannot see it, and cannot message a member.

7. What happens when you click

A partner link on our site passes through our own address first, so the click can be counted. That count is how the partner knows how many people we sent, and it is what every partner's monthly figures are built from. The redirect happens either way — refusing a cookie should cost you nothing.

• If you have allowed measurement cookies, a small first-party cookie called tmd_ref remembers for thirty days which link you came from, so the partner knows to credit us if you buy. Credit goes to the last link clicked. If you have not allowed measurement cookies, that cookie is not set and the click is a bare count with nothing attached to it. You can change that choice at any time under [Cookie Settings].
• The link that takes you to them carries our own campaign parameters — our name as the source, the medium, a campaign name, and which link it was. These are ours to set, not the partner's, so that no partner can claim another's traffic.
• One more parameter, and only if you allowed Advertising cookies: the name of the market the click came from, chosen from our own list of markets. A market name, never a postcode, never a point on a map, never a person. Without that consent we do not know where you are, and we do not guess.
• A partner may post their own sales back to us — a purchase, a signup, an add-to-cart or a lead, with a value and an order reference. That is their record of a sale, matched to a link code. It is never matched to you.
• The partner's own website may set its own cookies under its own policy, which we do not control.

What we share with a partner is in the table in section 5. What we never share is you. Our Privacy Policy has the full picture, including your rights under GDPR, UK GDPR and CCPA.

8. Questions

If a label ever seems wrong, or a post reads like an ad and is not marked as one, tell us at [CONTACT EMAIL]. We read every one, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.

9. The footer line

The one-line version that appears in the footer of every blog page, linking to this document:

Some links earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Sponsored posts are marked at the top. In Den of Mamas, one local card per feed, labelled, and it knows only which Den you are in. [How we work with brands]

For the attorney

This draft was written from the Playbook (Parts A3, D3, F3, G1, M1–M8, N7, O6), Part P, Den of Mamas Platform Specification (P10 is the governing source for everything in section 6), and the built system: the schema in supabase/migrations, the tracking register in apps/partner-portal/data/tracking.json, and the Den's own ad code. Every claim of fact here was checked against that code before it was written. Please confirm the following before publication.

United States

1. FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255, 2023 revision) and the Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements. Confirm the three labels in 3.1 and the placement rule in 3.2 meet the "clear and conspicuous" standard, and that "Affiliate links" is an acceptable label rather than "Ad" or "#ad." Confirm whether a single label at the top of a long recipe is sufficient, or whether a short disclosure must also sit beside each affiliate link within the post. Note that the built system places the label above the headline rather than beneath it; confirm that is acceptable or better.
2. Social placement (3.2). Confirm that a first-line caption label plus the platform's paid-partnership tool satisfies the FTC for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok, including video and Stories formats where the caption is not visible.
3. Ad slots (3.2). The blog's four ad positions carry the word Advertisement with the brand's name. Confirm that is right under the FTC's native-advertising guidance, and whether anything further is needed.
4. Gifted products (3.1). The Playbook does not address free products or samples, and the publishing system has no label for them. The FTC treats them as a material connection. Confirm whether the company will accept them at all and, if so, what the label says.
5. "At no cost to you" (In plain words, section 2, section 9). Confirm this is accurate under the terms of each affiliate network actually joined, and adjust if any network's pricing means it is not strictly true.
6. Network-required statements (section 2). Affiliate networks are not yet chosen (Playbook M9). If Amazon Associates is joined, its operating agreement requires an exact sentence on the site; other networks may have their own. Complete [AFFILIATE NETWORKS] and insert any required wording before this page goes live.

United Kingdom and EU readers

1. CAP Code and ASA guidance. For UK readers the ASA expects advertorial and affiliate content to be identifiable as advertising before engagement, and generally regards "Ad" as the safest label. Confirm whether "Sponsored," "Paid partnership" and "Affiliate links" are sufficient for UK readers, or whether "Ad" or "Affiliate ad" must be added or substituted. The same question applies to "Sponsored · Local to [Den]" on the Den card.
2. CMA guidance on incentivised endorsements, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Confirm the page and the labels meet the CMA's expectations for paid-for and affiliate endorsements.
3. EU. Confirm the labels and placement satisfy the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) as implemented in the member states where readers are likely to be, and whether any obligation under the Digital Services Act (Article 26, advertising on online platforms) applies to the blog, the newsletter, or the Den.

Cookies and data

1. tmd_ref and consent (section 7). The register classifies the attribution cookie as "measurement," so without consent no first-party attribution is recorded. Confirm this classification is correct under the ePrivacy Directive and UK PECR (it is not strictly necessary, so consent appears right), and confirm the plain-language description here matches the Privacy Policy and the cookie banner exactly.
2. The market parameter (section 7). On a tracked click the destination URL carries a market name in a campaign parameter, and only where advertising consent was given. The market is derived from the coarse, city-level location the network already attaches to the request; no coordinates and no postcode are stored against any reader. Confirm the consent category is right, that this is adequately disclosed here, and that it is consistent with the Privacy Policy.
3. What partners receive (sections 5 and 7). The table in section 5 is taken from the tracking register's own sharedWithPartner and neverSharedWithPartner lists and from the partner projection in the portal. Confirm they match the built system, including the postback events a partner sends us, and that nothing in the affiliate networks' own terms requires sharing more.
4. Rights summary (section 7). The page points to the Privacy Policy for GDPR, UK GDPR and CCPA rights rather than restating them. Confirm that is acceptable for a disclosure page.

Den of Mamas (section 6)

1. The reversal itself. An earlier published decision said the Den would carry no advertising and that no inventory should be built. Part P10 reverses it. Confirm that saying so plainly on this page — rather than quietly changing the sentence — is the right thing to do, and confirm the wording used here.
2. Whether a Local Den card is "profiling" or "sharing." The only fact used to place a card is which Local Den the feed belongs to. No identifier crosses any context and no third party is involved. Confirm the analysis under GDPR Article 4(4) and under CPRA's cross-context behavioural advertising definition, and align with the Privacy Policy's section 9.3.
3. The suppression rules. A card is withheld from a member for 30 days after a crisis flag and while a help request of hers is open. That flag is personal data derived from a sensitive circumstance. Confirm the legal basis, and confirm that describing the suppression publicly — while never telling the advertiser it happened — is the right disclosure.
4. The advertiser's report. Members reached is rounded to the nearest ten and withheld below 25. Confirm that threshold is adequate, and that describing it here creates no expectation the system cannot meet.
5. /advertise. It is the only page of the Den application that opens without signing in. The card is authorised at application and captured only on approval, through Stripe. Confirm the payment description, Stripe's role, and how the card form itself is served. Confirm the ad rate bands before the first advertiser: [AD RATE BANDS].

Promises made in the company's own name

1. "The post comes down until it is fixed" (3.3). This is enforced in the database for a Blog post and in the Den's ad code for a card. Confirm the company wishes to state it publicly.
2. "At least three that carry none" (section 4). The 3:1 ratio is a Playbook non-negotiable, counted across all four surfaces and enforced by refusing to schedule. Confirm the company wishes to publish it as a promise rather than keep it as an internal rule.
3. Editorial independence in writing (sections 4 and 5). The page states every partner agrees in writing never to influence what is written and to accept a lukewarm review. The database refuses an application in which either undertaking is unticked, and refuses an agreement that is not signed on both. Confirm the partnership agreement template (Playbook M9, item 4) and the affiliate onboarding record actually contain that clause before this page goes live.
4. The refused-category list (section 4). Confirm publishing the list creates no exposure — for example, a claim by a refused brand — and settle the two Part D3 categories flagged in the placeholder there.
5. Consistency. Cross-check every promise here against the Privacy Policy (sections 9.2, 9.4 and 16), the Terms of Service (sections 9 and 14), and the Community Standards page, so that no two documents can be read against each other. The three used to agree that the Den carried no advertising; all three now have to agree on what it does carry.

Placeholders to complete

1. [EFFECTIVE DATE], [COMPANY ADDRESS], [CONTACT EMAIL], [AFFILIATE NETWORKS], [AD RATE BANDS], [PARTNER NAME] (a template field, filled per post), [Cookie Settings] (link target), and the link target for [How we work with brands] (the footer link, which should resolve to this page).

End of draft.