21st Century ABE exists to help working adults and small business owners — most of our audience is between 35 and 60 — get to real business skills without the detour through a traditional degree program. That’s the whole point of the site. This page is about the money side of how we run it.
Some of the platforms we write about, like Coursera Business, QuickBooks, and LinkedIn Learning, pay us when a reader signs up through a link on our site. That’s a real financial relationship and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
Here’s what that does and doesn’t mean for you:
- We don’t accept a partnership with a tool we wouldn’t recommend on its own merits. If it doesn’t hold up for a working adult trying to learn on a tight schedule, it doesn’t get featured, paid partnership or not.
- Compensation doesn’t buy placement above a better option. If a free tool does the job better than a paid partner’s product, we’ll say so.
- Sponsored posts and affiliate links are marked as such. If you see a partner mention with no label, that’s an oversight — tell us and we’ll fix it.
- Being an affiliate doesn’t mean we’ve tested every feature of every product ourselves at every price tier. We tell you what we know firsthand versus what we’re relaying from the provider.
None of this changes what we charge you — using a link doesn’t cost you anything extra, and in some cases our readers get a discount the general public doesn’t.
If you want to know whether a specific piece of content involves a paid relationship, or you’ve spotted something that looks like it should’ve been disclosed and wasn’t, email us through the Contact Us page. We’ll answer directly.
