How this site earns, and what it refuses

The three

MasterClass, Skillshare and Domestika are the only companies Easelry links to for money. Each goes through an address on our own domain beginning /go/, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", and is labelled as a paid link in the panel it sits in.

If you subscribe after following one, the seller may pay us for the introduction. The price you are charged is the same whether you arrive through us or type the address yourself; we are paid out of the seller's margin, not added to your bill.

What we are allowed to say about the terms

Skillshare and Domestika both publish affiliate programmes that we would have to be accepted into. MasterClass is different: no official affiliate page resolves, and the commission figures in circulation come from third-party directories that contradict each other. So no commission rate, cookie window or network is printed for MasterClass anywhere on this site, because we have not seen one on a page MasterClass controls.

What is refused, and why it stays refused

• No coupon or promo-code pages. They are the thinnest thing in this business, they expire faster than we could maintain them, and they are the reason so much creative-course search is landfill.
• No paid placement, ever. A payout has never decided an order on this site and there is no rate card. The money page's own conclusion is that the cheapest option is often the one that pays us least.
• No affiliate link on a free route. Kanopy, hoopla, OpenLearn, Ctrl+Paint and YouTube appear on the money page because they are the right answer for some readers, and every one of them pays us nothing. That is the point of naming them.
• No invented figures to make a case. There is no outcome statistic anywhere on this site, because we have not measured one.

Why the free routes are on the money page

Because a recommendation you cannot trust is worth nothing, and the fastest way to make one untrustworthy is to hide the option that pays least. The advice to spend a fortnight on free material before committing a year's money costs us money every time someone takes it, and it is still the right advice.

This refusal is written down here on purpose. Reversing it would mean rewriting this page first, in public, with the date changed — which is a much higher bar than quietly adding a link.

Independence

Easelry has no commercial relationship with MasterClass, Skillshare or Domestika beyond the affiliate arrangements described above. None of them sees a page before it is published, none has approval over anything written here, and none can have a figure removed.