Ownership & Funding
Who owns AKRON SCORE
AKRON SCORE is published by a small independent editorial team that owns the operation outright. There is no parent media group, no outside shareholder pulling strings, no political party’s media arm, and no business empire with interests in the sectors we cover. The people who make the decisions here are the people who do the work, and there is nobody above them to answer to for the angle of a story.
We keep the ownership plain because it is the single most useful thing a reader can know about a publication. Ownership shapes what a newsroom is willing to say. Ours is structured so that no proprietor rings this desk to kill a story, and so that there is nowhere to hide: if AKRON SCORE publishes something indefensible, the people who own it published it, and the buck stops with them.
No state money, no party, no hidden backer
We take no money from any government, agency or official body, and we carry no undisclosed government advertising dressed up as coverage. We have no affiliation with any political party, campaign, candidate or the organisations that act for them, and we do not accept money from them. Political advertising that hides who is paying for it is refused. We would rather take the revenue hit than let our inventory quietly become somebody’s undeclared campaign spend.
There is no silent investor whose interests we protect, and no benefactor whose subjects are off-limits. If that ever changed, this page would say so before the money was spent, not in a footnote discovered later. A backer we could not name would be a backer we could not take.
Where the money actually comes from
Advertising is our primary source of revenue and, at present, close to all of it. Most is programmatic display filled through exchanges, with a smaller amount sold directly. Occasional clearly labelled sponsored posts and newsletter sponsorship make up the rest. The rules those sales run under, including the categories we refuse, are on our advertise page.
The site is free to read, with no paywall and no subscription. Where we use affiliate links, which earn us a small commission if you buy something after clicking, they are disclosed in the story that carries them, and the choice of what to recommend is the writer’s and not the merchant’s. We have no licensing or syndication income of note. If any of that changes, this page changes with it.
How advertising is kept away from the journalism
Because the team is small, the separation between money and reporting here is procedural rather than a matter of separate buildings, and it holds because the rules are few and absolute. Advertiser identities are not circulated with the day’s story list. No advertiser is told what is coming. No advertiser sees copy before publication, and no story is shown to a buyer for comment as a courtesy.
When an advertiser asks for a story to be softened or pulled, the answer is no, and the request itself may become something we report. When a company that advertises with us becomes the subject of a story, the story discloses the relationship. On programmatic inventory we usually do not even know which advertiser bought a given impression, which is inconvenient for selling and useful for everyone else. How this fits our wider rules is in our editorial standards.
Affiliate links, sponsored content and disclosure
Two revenue streams deserve their own paragraph because they are the ones most often blurred elsewhere. Sponsored content is material an advertiser paid to place. Where it appears, it is labelled as sponsored, plainly and at the top, not with a word so faint it might as well be absent. It is not written to look like one of our news reports, and it does not borrow the credibility of the newsroom.
Affiliate links are recommendations that earn us a commission on a sale. We disclose them in the article, we only include them where the recommendation would stand on its own without the commission, and the presence of a commission never decides what we rate highly. If you ever find one that reads like it was chosen for the payout rather than the reader, tell us and we will look at it.
Conflicts, and keeping this page honest
The people who run AKRON SCORE do not hold stakes in the companies on our beat or take paid work from parties, governments or businesses we cover. Where a writer has a personal or financial interest in a story, they declare it and hand the story to someone else. We pay our own way rather than accept trips, gifts or favours that could buy a slant.
If the ownership changes, if an investor appears, or if a new revenue stream grows into something that matters, this page is updated first, before any announcement elsewhere. The wider account of who we are is on our about page, and errors here are fixed the way errors in our reporting are, as our corrections policy describes. If something on this page reads as thin or evasive, say so: write to support@akronscore.org and ask the specific question.
Last updated: August 2026
