Sponsored Content Policy
Last updated: 5 September 2026
StockTalk SA earns money from company sponsorships, display advertising and broker referral fees. This page explains exactly what that buys, what it does not buy, and how you can tell paid placement from everything else on the site.
Everything paid is labelled
Every placement we are paid for carries a visible label at the point you see it — not in a footnote, not on this page only. The labels we use are:
- Sponsored — a pinned post or featured placement paid for by the listed company it concerns.
- Advertisement — a display banner sold to an advertiser.
- Affiliate link — a link to a broker or other third party that pays us a referral fee if you sign up.
These labels are part of the page itself. They are rendered by our server, not by a script, so they are present whether or not you run JavaScript and whether or not you use an ad blocker.
What a sponsorship buys
A sponsoring company gets, for the duration of its agreement:
- A verified company profile on its own stock page — corporate information, links and investor materials it publishes itself.
- The ability to pin one labelled Sponsored post to that stock’s discussion feed.
- Placement in the Featured Companies card on our dashboard and trending pages.
- A monthly engagement report covering its own placements.
What a sponsorship cannot buy
The following are not for sale, at any price, and no sponsorship agreement we sign will contain them:
- Community posts. We do not remove, hide, downrank or edit posts because a company dislikes them. Moderation follows our Community Guidelines and nothing else.
- Sentiment and signals. Sentiment scores, the StockTalk Sentiment Index and any signal output are computed from community activity and market data. Sponsorship is not an input. See our sentiment methodology.
- Editorial coverage. Which companies appear in our newsletters, blog posts and market wraps is decided on merit. Paying us does not put a company there, and not paying us does not keep one out.
- Search and rankings. Search results, trending lists and most-watched rankings are not weighted by sponsorship.
Affiliate and referral links
Some links to brokers and other financial-service providers earn us a fee if you open an account. Those links are labelled where they appear. A referral fee never changes what we say about a provider, and the order in which providers are listed is not sold.
StockTalk SA is not a registered Financial Services Provider and does not give advice about which broker to use. See our Disclaimer. Any broker you deal with is responsible for its own licensing, risk warnings and terms.
Who is behind a sponsored placement
A verified company profile is controlled by a person who has proven they work for that company, through our claim-and-review process. Posts made by such a person on their own company’s stock page carry an investor-relations badge, so you always know when you are reading the company rather than the community.
An approved claim is an identity check, not a payment. A company can hold a verified profile without paying us anything.
Telling us we got it wrong
If you find a paid placement on StockTalk SA that is not labelled, or you believe editorial content has been influenced by a commercial relationship, tell us and we will correct it. Email hello@stocktalk.co.za or use our contact form.