Advertising and Sponsorship Policy

Black Health earns money from display advertising, sponsorships, affiliate partnerships, paid job listings, and paid directory features. Four things are never for sale, at any price:

• Editorial conclusions. No advertiser, sponsor, or partner reviews, approves, or influences what our health guidance says.
• Position in the provider directory. Search results are ordered by relevance and distance to the reader. A provider cannot buy a higher ranking, and paid features never change result order.
• Verification status. A verified badge reflects checks we performed against the NPI Registry or a state licensing board. It cannot be purchased, and paying for anything else on this site does not confer it.
• Our readers' personal data. We do not sell reader data to advertisers, sponsors, or data brokers. See our Privacy Policy.

Every piece of content that a third party paid for or influenced carries a clear label at the top, before the content begins, in the same size and style as the surrounding text. We use one label for all of it: Sponsored, followed by the sponsor's name.

We deliberately do not use softer wording such as "supported by", "presented by", "in partnership with", or "brought to you by" as a substitute for a sponsorship label. Those phrases can read as editorial endorsement rather than disclosure. If money or value changed hands, the word is Sponsored, and it appears above the content, not at the bottom of the page.

This applies to every format: articles, videos, newsletters, social posts, clinical trial awareness placements, and any branded landing page.

Some links to products and services earn us a commission if you sign up. That commission never affects whether a service is included, how it is rated, or what we say about it. Pages containing affiliate links disclose it before the first such link. We do not accept payment for a positive review, and we publish real drawbacks alongside real benefits.

Black Americans are underrepresented in clinical research, and that underrepresentation is one reason treatments arrive less well tested in our communities. We will carry trial recruitment information where it genuinely serves readers. When we do:

• The sponsor is named, using the same Sponsored label as any other paid placement.
• Recruitment material is never presented as our own editorial recommendation to enroll.
• We link to the trial's official listing so a reader can read the criteria and risks independently.
• We do not receive per-enrollment payment tied to any individual reader's decision to join a study.

We decline advertising and sponsorship from skin lightening and skin bleaching products, unproven or unapproved treatments marketed as cures, products making weight loss claims unsupported by evidence, predatory lending and medical credit products, and any advertiser whose targeting depends on the race of our readers in a way we would not want disclosed to those readers. We also decline any placement that requires us to weaken the labeling rules above.

A sponsor does not get a lower evidence bar. Any health claim in sponsored content must trace to a primary source, meaning the entity that produced the finding: a peer-reviewed paper, a federal dataset, a regulator, or the agency that sets the number. Our editors verify sponsored claims the same way they verify our own, and we will refuse or amend copy that does not meet that bar, including copy already paid for.

Sponsored content is written or reviewed by our editorial team. Sponsors may review sponsored content they paid for to check factual accuracy about their own products. They do not review, and do not see in advance, any unsponsored editorial coverage.

If any payment we receive is passed to a physician or other covered healthcare provider, for example as an honorarium for medical review or advisory work, that payment may be reportable under the federal Physician Payments Sunshine Act and may appear publicly in the CMS Open Payments database under that clinician's name. We tell clinicians this before they agree to any paid engagement.

Most advertising on this site is served programmatically, which means individual ads are selected by advertising technology rather than chosen by us. We set category exclusions and review reports, but we do not approve each ad. Programmatic advertising has no relationship to our editorial coverage. If you see an ad here that violates the standards on this page, tell us at hello@blackhealth.org and we will block it.

If sponsored content contains a factual error, we correct it under the same rules as everything else. See our Corrections Policy. A sponsor cannot prevent a correction to content it paid for.

For advertising, sponsorship, research partnerships, or clinical trial awareness, contact hello@blackhealth.org. We will send current audience figures and formats. Every engagement is governed by this policy, and we put these terms in writing before any campaign runs.