Affiliate links

MyNodes tells you which skills would open the most doors. The obvious next question is where to learn them, and answering it means linking to courses that cost money — some of which pay us a commission. That is a conflict of interest, and the only honest way to handle one is to say exactly how it is contained.

Right now there are no affiliate links anywhere on MyNodes — the course recommendations are still being built. This page describes the rules that will apply from the first link onwards.

Commission does not affect what we recommend

Courses are ranked by how well they cover the skills your graph says you are missing, and by the ordinary things that make a course a good fit: level, language, length, rating, price. What a course pays us is not one of the inputs. It is not a weight set to zero — it is simply not part of the calculation.

If we ever accept paid placements, they will be kept out of the ranked list and labelled as paid, so you never have to wonder which is which.

We mark the links, where the links are

Affiliate links are marked next to the link itself, not in small print at the bottom of the page. You should know what a link is before you click it, not after.

The price you pay is the same either way. An affiliate link does not make a course more expensive, and we get nothing unless you actually buy.

What we count, and what we do not

When you follow one of these links we record that the link was clicked, and which account clicked it if you are signed in. That is all: no IP address, no browser fingerprint, no advertising identifiers. We keep it to see whether the recommendations are useful at all.

Once you land on the course provider's site, you are on their site. The affiliate network sets its own cookie there to attribute the sale — that cookie is theirs, not ours, and their privacy policy governs it. We never see who you are on their side, only that a purchase happened.

Why we tell you this

Every number in MyNodes can be traced back to what it is made of — that is the product. A recommendation quietly shaped by what pays best would break the one thing the rest of it is built on. So the rule is written down here, where you can hold us to it.