Contents
Sponsored content guidelines
About the content we’ll consider for publication
All our content has to be directly useful in helping investors to make better decisions, invest better, make more money, more safely, more confidently, educating them to improve their decisions.
It will usually have to be about online direct lending or other investment/legal structures that are in practical terms the same level of platform risk to investors as if they were lending money directly to the end borrower themselves.
We don't do/allow general news, whether it’s industry news, macroeconomics, politics or anything else. Pieces about broad industry trends, company news or other news aren't correlated directly enough to improving investors' results, and therefore are not for our audience.
Naturally, we already have a huge amount of extensive and detailed content. We get very deep into our assessments and guidance. So we also probably won’t take content that repeats what we have already covered. In other words, any content has to add value, being genuinely useful to investors in deepening their knowledge or understanding of something.
Certainly, telling our readers money lending/underwriting 101 is not going to be good enough. You’ll need to provide some of your secret sauce if you want to go down that route.
Furthermore, if it’s repeating what’s on your own website (or perhaps elsewhere), it’s less likely to be approved by us.
The reality is that it's very tough to get new content on 4thWay!
Tips on content to submit (if you’re a lending platform)
- You could get very deep into some aspect of your credit policy, underwriting processes or collections processes. Not just skin deep, but sharing some of your unique “secret sauce” – probably that you have not already revealed to us in due diligence.
- It might mean explaining how investors have come up with novel ways to optimise their investing strategies through your platform.
- It might involve gathering stories from investors on how easy it has been for them to deploy or withdraw their cash in recent times, as that information can help them decide whether to invest. (Since we generally get no data on that from platforms and therefore can only report anecdotally.) However, that by itself might not be a sufficient topic to cover a whole article.
- It might mean gathering stories from investors on how they have optimised use of your website to save themselves time or make it easier.
- It might involve breaking down investor performance on your site in different ways, e.g. by number of investments held. (However, it doesn’t mean sharing anecdotal stories from investors about their individual results through your platform. Looking at how a small batch of individuals have performed is not a sensible way to make investing decisions, so we won’t share those stories with our investor community.)
Content we have rejected in the past
Mostly, the content ideas we’ve received and rejected in the past have been in two categories:
- Am explanation of typical money lending, underwriting, loan monitoring or collections processes (already covered by us).
- Company or industry news with no direct impact on investors’ decision making to improve their results.
Editing your content
We will likely edit your content – as lightly as possible – to ensure a high standard of English and for accuracy.
If we deem necessary, we may also edit it as little as possible to simplify it for a wider audience or to change words, terms or sentences you use to make them more consistent with 4thWay’s own style, which will be more easily understood by our readers.
If we spot factual errors, we’ll let you know. For your content, 4thWay is the ultimate arbiter of whether something is factually accurate or not.
Advertising guidelines
When advertising on the 4thWay site (e.g. banner ads) or having an advertising banner/placement in a 4thWay email:
- We will consider whether we ourselves would buy your product or service if we were in your target market.
- We will be checking for accuracy.
- We will be checking for consistency with 4thWay. (E.g. if you present investment returns in a way that is not consistent with other investment providers, we will ask you to recalculate and show your workings.)
- We will make an assessment as to whether the price of your products or services is reasonable.
- We’ll be checking that the adverts are highly relevant to our audience.
