Affiliate & sponsored content disclosure

An affiliate link is an outbound link to a partner's site where, if you click through and then book or buy something, that partner may pay Active Scene a small referral fee. It costs you nothing extra— you pay exactly the same price you would have paid going there directly. The fee comes out of the partner's margin, not your pocket.

Where we use affiliate links, you'll typically find them on outbound links such as:

• festival and event ticketing providers;
• dancewear and retail partners — shoes, apparel and the like;
• certain organiser booking pages, where the partner offers a referral fee.

Not every outbound link is an affiliate link — most are just plain links we include because they're useful. Affiliate links are only a small part of the picture, and where one is present we mark it (see below).

This is the part that matters most. Affiliate relationships and the payments that come with them never influence our editorial decisions— full stop. They play no part in which events get listed, which festivals we recommend in our guides, or which organisers we feature in city guides. We don't rank, promote or bury anything based on whether there's a referral fee attached.

Editorial independence is the core of why dancers can trust the directory. A listing earns its place because it's genuinely worth your time, never because someone is paying us — and we'd rather link to the right thing with no fee than the wrong thing with one.

We don't expect you to take this page on faith every time you click. Wherever a link earns us a referral fee, we mark it right next to the link itself with a small (affiliate) marker, so you can recognise it in the moment rather than having to remember a policy. You may also see it written as Partner link in places where that reads more naturally — it means the same thing.

This page is simply where the full explanation lives. If you see (affiliate) on the site and want to know what it means, this is the answer.

A promoted placement is a different thing entirely. When a listing is promoted, it means an organiser has paid Active Scene to display their event or listing more prominently — for example higher up a city page, or carrying a Promoted badge. Promoted placements are always clearly badged as such, so you can tell at a glance that the position was paid for.

Crucially, our editorial coverage is never for sale. City guides, organiser interviews and the recommendations we write are not paid placements and cannot be bought. A promoted slot is an additional placement on top of the directory — it is never paid editorial dressed up as a recommendation.

The detailed rules that govern promoted placements live in our Promoted Placement Terms.

We don't currently sell sponsorship in any newsletter or push notification. If we ever do — for instance a single sponsored slot in a weekly digest — that content will be clearly marked as sponsored so you always know what you're reading. The same principle applies as everywhere else: sponsorship is labelled, and it never masquerades as editorial.

For a directory, trust is the whole game. Active Scene is only useful if you can rely on the listings to be there because they're worth your time — not because someone paid for the slot. That's why we treat disclosure as a deliberate policy rather than a legal afterthought: marking affiliate links and badging promoted placements is how we keep faith with the dancers who use the site, and how we earn the right to be the place you check every week.

If anything here is unclear, or you spot something on the site that isn't marked the way it should be, please tell us — we want to get this right. Email us at support@activescene.org.