Breakthrough prides itself on the quality, relevance and impact of its content. This content is provided to you – our valued audience – free of charge. We want you to learn about breakthrough science in a free and accessible format.
However, this content takes significant time, resources and funding to create. It’s difficult to stay afloat as a free online media in the 21st century. To continue delivering you content, we rely on the help of various sponsors and advertisers.
We believe that to be financially sustainable and grow our impact, Breakthrough should rely mostly on a business model focused on advertisements rather than a charitable model relying on grants, government funding and other forms of donations.
To maintain transparency and ethical standards, we believe it is necessary to declare our advertisers and sponsors where needed on the Breakthrough website. The following is an overview of our funding sources:
Banner ads
We place banner ads on some of our articles and webpages. These banners will display advertisements from various advertisers, whom we either work with directly (direct buying) or are automatically displayed by an ad network (programmatic).
Sponsored articles
Some of our written articles are paid for by advertisers. We refuse to promote any particular agenda from advertisers, however the sponsored articles may contain a quotation from a representative from the advertiser’s company as well as a backlink to their website.
To identify if an article is sponsored, simply look at the “Tags” at the bottom of an article, where the article will declare its sponsorship. Below is an example from this sponsored article about blue light-blocking glasses:
Sponsored videos
The videos we create have a high price tag. There are a lot of processes involved: script writing, interviews with researchers, animations, narration, video shooting and video editing. To fund video content, we rely on the research teams being interviewed to pay for these processes using their research funding.
Again, we do not promote any particular agenda from advertisers.
In-video advertisements
When we publish a video on the Breakthrough YouTube channel, YouTube may display various in-video ads from their advertisers. We receive a margin from YouTube whenever they post an advertisement.
Email newsletters
Breakthrough distributes a monthly newsletter. From time-to-time, this newsletter may contain a banner or message from our advertisers, which they have paid us to add to the newsletter. Where there is such a paid promotion, we declare it with the use of an “Advertising” tag.
Social media posts
Breakthrough occasionally posts paid promotions (statuses or banners) to our social media channels. These posts have been paid for by our advertisers. Where there is such a paid promotion, we declare it with the use of an “Advertising” tag.