DisclosedConsumer transparency infrastructure · US & Canada

Report card

nytimes.com

Insufficient data

Generated 2026-09-17 under SPEC: Scoring — v0.6.12. State: Not scored — below the article threshold.

Do they get paid?

84.0%

Monetization exposure across 25 articles. A fact, never scored.

Do they tell you?

0.250

Article-weighted disclosure deficiency, A = 0 through F = 1. Lower means the disclosure appears earlier relative to the first link.

Does the pay change the picks?

not published

Fewer qualifying articles than SPEC §2.2 requires.

Monetization exposure — what was observed

Ranked picks examined
245
Picks with a link established as affiliate
123
— of which badged (confirmed or likely)
123
— of which runtime-attributed only, never badged
0
Picks whose status was not established
122
Observation coverage
50.2%

A pick whose status was not established is counted apart from a pick observed to be unmonetized. Each reason is published on its own, because they are different situations and one of them is about us rather than about the publisher:

Reason the status was not establishedPicks
cloaked unresolved0
declared sponsored unverified0
no observed link119
external destination unclassified3

Marked sponsored by the publisher — what was observed on those links

Direct merchant links so marked
0
Ranked picks they appear on
0
Carrying a real runtime attribution subtag
0
Carrying the literal "undefined" — the publisher’s code found no program
0

No direct merchant links on this publisher carry the publisher’s own rel="sponsored" without a detected affiliate mechanism.

Declared, not observed

Picks priced from a declared merchant
66
Declared merchants that resolve to no rate card
28
Hosts involved
amazon.com, avantree.com, walmart.com

66 ranked pick(s) are priced against a merchant the publisher DECLARED in the link itself (merchant= — a parameter the publisher wrote): amazon.com, avantree.com, walmart.com. THE DESTINATION WAS DECLARED, NOT OBSERVED — we did not follow the link and do not know that it arrives there. What we observed is the publisher naming the merchant in its own markup; the rate is that merchant’s own published schedule, with its source and date shown beside every number. 28 further pick(s) declare a merchant we cannot resolve to a rate card — an opaque publisher id, or a merchant whose schedule we do not hold. Those stay unpriced (r = null) and are excluded from the correlation. They are counted here so the gap is visible rather than silent.

Payout–Rank correlation

No correlation is published for this publisher

Not scored — below the article threshold

A qualifying article is one with enough priced picks, enough rated picks, and enough rate coverage for a per-article correlation to exist. This publisher has some, but fewer than the threshold. The count is shown below with the reason each article was excluded. Nothing about the correlation is shown, because the threshold is what decides whether it may be shown at all.

The card records Insufficient data as the headline it would print, and prints no median, no interval and no Kickback Score. The inputs below are published anyway, so the same computation can be run against them.

Disclosure

GradeArticlesShare
A00.0%
B25100.0%
C00.0%
D00.0%
F00.0%

§1.5 is purely positional. The A/B boundary here is measured against the first OUTBOUND link, which is at or before the first AFFILIATE link, so this test is stricter than §1.5 and can only understate a grade, never overstate one.

Diagnostics published beside the figures

Gaming flag count
0
Band-sensitive articles
5
Picks priced from a rate band
7
Picks linking more than one merchant
28

Count of qualifying articles with ρ > 0.99 at n ≤ 5.

Sole-Paid-Pick Placement

Articles with exactly one paid pick
9
Of those, paid pick observed at rank 1
0
Expected at rank 1 by chance
2.3167
z
-1.7831
p
1.0000
SPP₁
0.0000
p-value method
exact_poisson_binomial
Published on the card
no

Not published: §1.6 requires |A₁| ≥ 20 and this publisher has 9.

Articles excluded from the pool, by reason

Exclusion reasonArticles
fewer than 2 priced picks14
fewer than 4 rated picks15
rate coverage undefined4
rate coverage below threshold13
rho undefined3

Reasons may co-occur on the same article, so these counts do not sum to a total.

Right of reply

State: silent. We wrote to this publisher and the seven-day window closed without a reply. Not replying is not agreement with anything on this card, and we do not present it as one.

Written to letters@nytimes.com, corrections@nytimes.com on 2026-09-10T00:11:05Z. Basis for that address: published letters desk and corrections desk Seven-day window closes 2026-09-17T00:11:05.000Z.

Received 2026-09-17T20:41:26.481Z — our note: AUTOMATED REPLY — machine-generated, not a reply to the letter, and it answers nothing. Received 2026-09-10T00:11:20Z from letters@nytimes.com (headers Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, X-Autoreply: yes), 15 seconds after the letter went to letters@nytimes.com and corrections@nytimes.com; nothing came from corrections@. Nothing else arrived before the window closed 2026-09-17T00:11:05Z, in either mailbox. The message was HTML-only; the text below is its rendering by macOS textutil, with nothing added or removed by hand. The message as received: data/replies/evidence/nytimes.com-2026-09-10T00-11-20Z.eml, sha256 b44ddc9694de622606582899ab4a7151cd605e77a7e3e3bf2b18c988ff0fd8ca.
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Confounds, stated by us, first

  1. Reverse causality. A publisher may negotiate a higher rate because it already ranks a product well. The §5 event study partially addresses this by measuring ranking changes after rate changes. It does not eliminate it.
  2. Category confounding. High-commission categories may differ in quality.
  3. Brand-size confounding. Products with affiliate programs skew toward larger brands, which may be better on average.
  4. Rate coverage. We observe roughly half the market. The rate coverage figure on this card is the measured share for this publisher.
  5. Editorial firewalls are real. Where the median ρ is at or below zero, that is stated on this card in the same size type as every other number.
  6. Private-network rate invisibility. Merchants on Impact, CJ, Rakuten and Partnerize keep rates private, so their picks carry r = null and are dropped from ρ. Those are systematically different merchants from Amazon’s — large retailers rather than marketplace sellers. The sign of the resulting bias is indeterminate.
  7. Per-transaction earnings caps and negotiated tiers mean a published nominal rate is an upper-bound proxy for effective compensation. eBay’s published rate card carries a per-transaction cap on every category (550 USD on Electronics, 100 USD on eBay Motors and on Real Estate) and states that exceptions to the rate card exist for certain partners. Roborock publishes 4%–7% and Narwal 4%–10%, and where a given publisher’s tier falls within either band is negotiated privately. On a high-priced item a per-transaction cap can put the amount actually earned, expressed as a percentage of price, below the published rate. This is a disclosure: it moves no estimator and no r_i.

Recompute this

Every input this card was computed from. A third party who cannot recompute a figure from what is published here should treat the figure as unsupported, and we would rather they did.

publisher
nytimes.com
spec version
SPEC: Scoring — v0.6.12
generated at
2026-09-17T21:55:39.581Z
card status
insufficient_data
corpus dir
data/corpus
rates dir
data/rates
articles with picks
25
qualifying articles
4
anti recommendation excluded
none
article ids
25 entries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 hosts observed
167 entries
2min2x.org
aafa.org
academic.oup.com
acousticfields.com
ajpmonline.org
amazon.com
andrehmack.com
antennaweb.org
apple.com
appleinsider.com
apps.microsoft.com
aquasonic.com
arnejacobsen.com
atsu.edu
autonomous.ai
avantree.com
avocadogreenmattress.com
babyprooferlongisland.com
babysafetyalliance.org
beatsbydre.com
bestbuy.com
bfold.com
bike-tube.net
bluetooth.com
branchfurniture.com
brommieyummie.wordpress.com
btod.com
business.cornell.edu
byloftie.com
cardinalgates.com
casper.com
cdn.thewirecutter.com
certipur.us
ces.tech
channelmaster.com
charlesludington.com
childproofingexperts.com
cnet.com
coasttocoastam.com
community.adobe.com
controlunion.com
coravin.com
costco.com
cpsc.gov
creekbike.com
crossfit.com
customerservice.costco.com
dent.umich.edu
dental.upenn.edu
dentistry.osu.edu
dl.razerzone.com
docs.google.com
docs.microsoft.com
download.p4c.philips.com
education.pitt.edu
en.wikipedia.org
ergo.human.cornell.edu
euromini.zendesk.com
extension.purdue.edu
fcc.gov
gardenridgedentistry.com
hdradio.com
heatherwick.com
help.avocadogreenmattress.com
help.samsclub.com
help.serta.com
herl.pitt.edu
homedepot.com
hp.com
iec.ch
ifixit.com
imagingscience.com
inkbird.com
instagram.com
iwawine.com
jada.ada.org
jbl.com
jpma.org
kbwheels.com
keckmedicine.org
leesa.com
legday.substack.com
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
legislation.nysenate.gov
lenovo.com
lifehacker.com
linkedin.com
loftie.com
logitech.com
logitechg.com
macworld.com
maisonnoirwines.com
masterclass.com
mattressmakers.com
mccormick.northwestern.edu
mdpi.com
moreganic.com
mouthhealthy.org
naturepedic.com
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
newgateworld.com
nomadcycle.com
nordstrom.com
nyc.gov
nypost.com
nytimes.com
oralb.com
play.google.com
plushbeds.com
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
publichealth.berkeley.edu
pugetsystems.com
quince.com
rabbitears.info
radio-locator.com
reddit.com
reference.com
rei.com
ridehelix.ca
roccofridge.com
saatva.com
saatvahelp.saatva.com
safenestbaby.com
sbchildproofing.com
schechnerdental.com
sciencedirect.com
serta.com
sleeponlatex.com
smithsonianmag.com
soundasleepproducts.com
sounds.byloftie.com
store.ternbicycles.com
stores.casper.com
stores.naturepedic.com
support.apple.com
support.channelmaster.com
support.leesa.com
support.logi.com
target.com
techthelead.com
tempurpedic.com
ternbicycles.com
tsa.gov
twitter.com
unionderm.com
upliftdesk.com
usa.dahon.com
usa.philips.com
usb.org
walmart.com
wayfair.com
web.archive.org
wikihow.com
wineberserkers.com
wineenthusiast.com
winespectator.com
winkbeds.com
worldwildlife.org
wpr.org
wrctr.co
wsetglobal.com
wsj.com
www2.census.gov
x.com
youtu.be
youtube.com
zizzo.bike
verticals matched
15 entries
alarm clocks
baby gates
earbuds
electric toothbrushes
fitness gear
folding bikes
gaming headsets
headphones
laptops
laser hair removal devices
mattresses
standing desks
weekender bags
wine fridges
wireless mice
amazon rate sources
US
file
data/rates/amazon-us.json
source url
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZ
fetched at
2026-09-05T21:56:26.934Z
table sha256
ea97cd4fc12108d018958e8ee57941109c803dd0203bbd4f4715069c0b21408d
default rate
0.04
CA
file
data/rates/amazon-ca.json
source url
https://associates.amazon.ca/help/node/topic/GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZ
fetched at
2026-09-05T21:56:32.508Z
table sha256
6876ec738879654e535a0340d81268aacc55e2b938d08c96416b8c856eda55ba
default rate
0.02
merchant rate card
data/rates/merchants.json
snapshot index
data/corpus/snapshots.jsonl
inclusion criteria
min priced picks k
2
min rated picks n
4
min rate coverage C
0.6
min qualifying articles
20
kickback weights
R
0.75
O
0.25
version
3.0.0
disclosure deficiency scale
A
0
B
0.25
C
0.5
D
0.75
F
1
bootstrap resamples
2000
quantile method
type-7 (linear interpolation; the R and NumPy default)
ci percentile convention
lower bound at floor(0.025 * B), upper bound at ceil(0.975 * B) - 1 (positions 50 and 1949 at B = 2000)

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