How Cultural Heritage Online sustains itself
Cultural Heritage Online has documented European heritage continuously since 1998. Keeping more than 11,000 place entries accurate, mapped and freely readable has real costs. This page explains, in plain language, every way this publication earns money — so you can always tell editorial judgement from commercial interest.
Affiliate links
Some pages may contain affiliate links: if you buy a ticket or an object through them, we receive a commission from the seller. The price you pay never changes.
Three commitments govern every affiliate link on this site:
- Labelled, always. Affiliate links are marked so you know before you click.
- Editorial selection first. We link to tickets, books or objects because they belong to the story being told — never the other way around. No commission can buy a mention, a place entry, or a kinder adjective.
- Relevance only. We work only with partners coherent with what we publish: ticketing for museums and heritage sites, art and antiques marketplaces, books and films about the subjects our pages cover, and practical travel services that put us in no position to bend a judgement — mobile data for travellers, for instance. We do not run affiliate programs for accommodation booking: many historic hotels are our editorial subjects, and we will not earn from steering readers toward or away from them.
Sponsored and promoted content
Paid placements — promoted events, partner mentions, sponsored sections — always carry a visible label. The paying party is never the subject of independent editorial coverage without that relationship being disclosed. Our newsletter separates earned editorial mentions from partner citations.
Memberships
Operators and organisers can subscribe to paid plans that give them tools — event promotion, statistics, direct page management. A paid plan never alters the facts on a place entry: history is not for sale.
Tools we recommend to contributors
This is a different thing from the affiliate links above, and it is worth keeping separate. Some of the tools we suggest to the operators, photographers and organisers who publish here — for instance the account they use to receive the money their work earns — carry a referral arrangement: if they open an account through our link, we receive a fee from the provider. It costs them nothing.
Three rules govern those suggestions:
- Said out loud, where it is suggested. If we earn from a tool, it says so on the same screen where we suggest it — not only here.
- Never the only way. Any bank account works. We suggest a tool because it is faster or cheaper for the contributor, and we say plainly what the alternative is.
- It buys nothing. Which tool a contributor uses changes nothing about what we publish of theirs, how their pages are edited, or where they appear.
What we never do
- We never sell editorial coverage, reviews or rankings.
- We never remove or soften verified facts in exchange for payment.
- We never share or sell reader data to partners.
Questions about a specific link or label? Write to us through the contact page — we answer, and if something is mislabelled we fix it publicly.
This page is updated whenever a new revenue relationship begins. Current affiliate partners, both since September 2026: Amazon, for books and films about the subjects our pages cover, and Simsima, for the travel eSIM suggested in the practical tips on place and itinerary pages. Referral arrangements for the tools we suggest to contributors are listed in the section above.