As other users have pointed out, the Jelly Deals post isn’t an ad. Jelly Deals is a deals website run by Gamer Network, with an editorial team who hunt deals out around the web that they think are good value for good stuff. Yes, they/we get affiliate revenue of a few pennies if someone clicks the link and buys something, but the deals are only posted if they think they’re good. Same for our own coverage.
We’ve designed the box to look obviously different from other RPS posts so it’s clear that it’s from a different editorial team. This is the first such post we’ve run from Jelly Deals, but Eurogamer have had similar posts for months/years. (And Kotaku have done something similar with their own sister site for years and years, alongside most of the rest of the web.)
I understand people worry about advertising and editorial and money all swirling together. We continue to not run any advertorial on the site, unlike our competitors. We continue to have a strong separation between the church and state of editorial and advertising. I’m confident that affiliate revenue does not affect our editorial independence. Our own deals output similarly only covers deals we think are worthwhile, though these things are, as always, subjective.
Fundamentally, if the deals posts are not useful to the audience, the audience won’t click on them or buy items through them, and we’ll stop doing them. So far that’s not the case. In some ways the commenters here are right in that they’re a “necessary evil” - I’d still much rather people just paid to read articles on the internet - but so far people clearly find them useful, so maybe they’re not even evil.
