Sponsored content policy

Only two things on this site are paid placement:

• Display advertising. Third-party ad units rendered by a configured advertising provider, each labelled “Advertisement”.
• Featured business listings. A business pays for a labelled placement on the featured businesses page, on relevant festival pages, or in a coupon slot on the deals page.

Nothing else is. Gift guides, rankings, festival pages, dates, rituals, recipes, wishes, tools and answers to reader questions are editorial and are never for sale.

• A visible chip. Every sponsored card carries a “Sponsored” or “Featured” badge in the top corner, not a footnote.
• A visually different card. Sponsored cards use a distinct tinted background and a different border colour from every editorial card on the site, so the difference is perceptible before the label is read.
• A named section. Paid placements sit under headings that say what they are — “Featured businesses”, “Paid placement” — never inside a list of editorial recommendations.
• A disclosure link. Each sponsored section links back to this page.

• Three sponsored listings per page, maximum, enforced in the component rather than trusted to whoever edits the content.
• Four ad units per page, maximum, enforced in code, so an ad-heavy template cannot be created by accident.
• Never above the H1, never inside a tool’s output, never between a countdown and its date, and never adjacent to a download or share button.
• Never inside the FAQ block of a festival page, because a reader asking a direct question should get a direct answer.

Sponsorship has no effect on any of the following. This is not a policy aspiration; it is how the site is structured, because sponsored content is rendered by separate components from separate data files.

• Festival dates, or their confidence labels.
• Ritual descriptions, traditions or regional variations.
• Recipes, puja steps, decoration quantities or budget estimates.
• Gift guide categories, their ordering, or which ones are shown.
• Search result ranking.
• Answers to reader questions.

These are shown to readers and to advertisers alike — the same text appears on the featured businesses page:

• Every paid listing carries a visible 'Featured' or 'Sponsored' label. We never run paid content without a label.
• We do not sell reviews, rankings, ratings or recommendations. Gift guides are editorial and are not for sale.
• We cap paid placements at three per page so that the page remains useful when the sponsorship budget is zero.
• We do not accept listings for products or services that are illegal in India, or for financial products promising guaranteed returns.
• Sponsorship never changes a festival date, a ritual description or any factual content on the site.
• Rates are per campaign and are published on request. There is no auction and no hidden bidding.

You can verify most of it yourself:

• Count the sponsored cards on the featured businesses page — there will never be more than three in a section.
• Compare a gift guide before and after a campaign; a paid listing cannot move an entry in it.
• Check that no ad unit on any page carries a label other than “Advertisement” or “Sponsored”.
• Report anything that looks like an unlabelled paid placement. It would be a bug, and we would want to fix it: use the contact page.

Because paid placements have to be sold to be real, and selling them takes time. The site is built so that every sponsored section renders usefully when empty — with the listing criteria and a way to enquire — rather than being filled with invented businesses to make the page look populated. A directory of fake shops would be exactly the kind of fake information this site exists to avoid.