Editorial Policies and Disclosures

Last updated on September 23, 2024

As the first and foremost champions of transparency in the mattress industry, we are also completely open with GoodBed readers about our own business relationships. Naturally, this includes meeting or exceeding the standards for media disclosure put forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We wrote this document to address any questions you may have about how GoodBed makes money and how we handle any conflicts of interest we may face in doing the work that we do.

How does GoodBed make money?

Creating the high-quality content and sophisticated technology on which GoodBed readers rely takes a lot of work. As an example, a single editorial review requires 50-100 hours for testing, evaluating, fact-checking, filming, writing, and editing (not to mention additional time spent sleeping on the mattress, of course). Meanwhile, our software team is constantly enhancing and maintaining GoodBed’s website – including our unique database of products and stores, unrivaled search tools and matching algorithms, and industry-leading consumer review platform.

In order to provide this service at no cost to GoodBed readers, we support our work through various forms of advertising and other business services. Below is a summary of the principal ways in which GoodBed makes money.

Referral Fees

As a marketplace, GoodBed publishes links to products offered for sale at hundreds of different retailers. When you purchase a product using one of the links or promotions shown on this site, GoodBed often (but not always) receives a referral fee. When and if we do, this fee comes at no cost to you, the consumer. In most cases, using the links and promotions that earn GoodBed money actually result in extra savings for the consumer.

GoodBed currently receives referral fees from nearly all major mattress brands. Importantly, we also receive referral fees from hundreds of local stores across the country. This unique breadth of business relationships allows us to remain both brand-agnostic and channel-agnostic, and prevents any one of our relationships from having influence over the reviews, ratings, or opinions that we provide. Without the pressure to favor a limited group of advertisers, we can focus first and foremost on what we have always done best – helping our readers search across the many available options to find the best products and stores for them.

Online retailers typically use 'affiliate links' in order to track the origin of the sale. GoodBed has affiliate advertising relationships with most major online mattress retailers. GoodBed is also a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. See here for a complete list of our affiliate partners.

With many companies, GoodBed is able to secure special discounts, coupons, or promo codes for our readers. In addition to saving you extra money, redeeming a discount that is unique to GoodBed gives the retailer another way to track the origin of the sale.  In such cases, GoodBed may earn revenue when that discount is used.

When possible, we even share a portion of our advertising fees with our readers in the form of Cash Back on your mattress purchase. This money comes directly from GoodBed, so is on top of any discounts you get from the retailer at checkout. For example, to help our readers save more money when shopping at trusted local stores, we partner with select retailers to offer our readers Cash Back on their in-store purchases. To participate, retailers can apply to become part of this program. If accepted, they agree to pay GoodBed a referral fee for sending you their way – which we then share with you as Cash Back. In many cases, we offer our readers Cash Back on purchases made from online retailers as well. 

Advertisements

GoodBed accepts and publishes paid display advertisements (a.k.a. ‘banner ads’) on the site. These advertisements are clearly delineated as advertising and have no impact on our editorial process or content. Our display ads are often served by an independent 3^rd party such as Google AdSense, in which case we have no control at all over what ads will be shown to a given user.

Integrated Content

GoodBed publishes profile pages about tens of thousands of different products and stores. In some cases, companies pay GoodBed to add more detailed information to their profile pages. This information is kept separate from our editorial content, and has no bearing on that company’s ratings or reviews. Companies who provide information in this manner may appear higher in some of our search results on account of their information being more current, accurate, and/or complete. Wherever possible, the name of the company that provided the information is clearly noted (e.g., “Product Description from Company ABC”).

Review Survey Tool

Getting customer feedback on mattresses is hard, and those companies that proactively ask all their customers for reviews tend to have more representative ratings than those that don't. In order to provide the most useful ratings and reviews for our readers, GoodBed helps companies proactively survey large numbers of their customers in a way that generates a broader and more representative sampling of customer feedback. This program is available to all mattress manufacturers and retailers. Companies that choose to utilize this program pay us a nominal fee that helps cover only a portion of our direct costs of providing this service. Participation in this program has no impact on how we moderate reviews of a company’s products or stores, nor on how we calculate their overall ratings.

Do you get mattresses for free? If yes, does that make you biased?

As the premier source of expert unbiased information about mattresses, GoodBed is highly selective about which products we review. Once we choose a product that we feel merits our attention, the manufacturer sends it to us knowing that our reviews are critical, independent, and highly valued by our readers.

In our case, the products we review have no value to us beyond the ability to test them and share the results with our readers. In most cases our testing process involves destroying the mattress, whether by cutting it open to evaluate the materials or by performing durability testing (or both). In addition, our founder (who is also our principal product tester) can only sleep on one mattress — and not surprisingly, he already has one that works well for him and his wife. As such, receiving dozens of mattresses each year does not in any way provide a benefit to him or the company. In fact, while we are not charged for the products we test, each mattress we receive creates additional expense for us to temporarily store it during testing, and then eventually dispose of it. 

That said, our situation does not apply to many other reviews you see. For example, a general publication that reviews many different types of products will likely have a large team of reviewers, most of whom would surely love the opportunity to receive a new mattress if one were provided for free. This would be quite a substantial source of bias. Likewise, a social media influencer who does not focus on mattresses would probably be able to use that product in their home, saving them thousands of dollars. So, if you are looking at reviews from any source that does not specialize in mattresses, make sure it's clearly stated that they paid full price for any mattress that they review – otherwise, that content is most likely biased.

What do you do with mattresses after you've tested them?

Once we have finished testing a mattress, there are several ways we can dispose of it, none of which provide any benefit to GoodBed. First, if the mattress has not been destroyed during the testing process, we attempt to donate that mattress to a local charity. Sometimes though, donation isn’t possible – e.g., because of laws that prevent local charities from accepting used mattresses. In such cases, our next option would be to sell the test mattress at a very steep discount, and then donate the proceeds of that sale to charities or other non-profit organizations in our community. If neither of those options are possible (e.g., because the mattress has been destroyed as part of the test process), then as a last resort we will send the mattress to either a recycling center (where available) or landfill. Managing the disposal of test products is one of the many operational costs of our review process.

How does GoodBed avoid potential conflicts of interest?

In creating the editorial content that we publish on GoodBed, our focus is on providing the most truthful and useful information to our readers. As such, all articles and videos created by GoodBed are strictly editorially driven, and absolutely no payments in cash or in kind are accepted from advertisers or external companies to create or influence this content.

Likewise, when moderating posts from our users (reviews, comments, questions, answers, etc.) we make sure that our moderators follow clear and consistent content guidelines that are published here on the site. Posts that adhere to these guidelines are published, and posts that do not are removed – regardless of whether they are positive or negative, or whether they pertain to companies with whom we have business relationships.

Due to our uniquely in-depth review process, we can only review a small portion of mattresses that are offered to us. Performing an in-depth editorial review to our standards requires 50-100 hours of work, many of which specifically require our founder, the country's leading independent mattress expert. As such, we make sure to prioritize all of our editorial efforts based on input from our readers. When we select a product that we feel merits our review, that product is then sent to us by the manufacturer. Beyond providing the products for us and answering any questions we may have about them, no manufacturers have any participation in our review process.

GoodBed was started in 2008 with the goal of creating the world’s largest and most trusted shopping resource for mattresses – a long-term ambition that provides GoodBed with a critical “north star” in everything we do. While any ad-supported business has to navigate conflicts of interest in the short-term, we have always believed that over the long-term, our economic self-interest is tied most closely to our success in serving our readers, and to their trust in the information that we provide. Having already invested over a decade of our lives building the trust that GoodBed has today, we are keenly aware that trust is hard to earn and can be easy to lose. This long-term mindset keeps us fiercely vigilant about staying true to our values of objectivity and transparency on a daily basis.

Who owns GoodBed?

GoodBed is a completely independent, privately held company. Our majority owner is our founder, Michael Magnuson. Our minority investors are individuals who have no other affiliation with the mattress industry. 

Why should I trust GoodBed?

Here at GoodBed, we have always strived to be completely objective and transparent with everything we do. Each aspect of our site – from editorial content to software – is designed first and foremost to serve our readers in helping them to find and buy the perfect bed. We hope you agree that the resulting quality of information we provide speaks for itself.

More specifically, below are some other good reasons to trust GoodBed. You can also check out our handy guide on how to spot an untrustworthy mattress review site.

• We have real mattress expertise – developed over 15+ years. GoodBed has been covering the mattress category since 2008 – longer than any other mattress-focused information resource. Unlike general publications that review every type of consumer product – and are known to brag about spending a few weeks testing mattresses – our knowledge of this product category runs a decade deep.
• We put more time into every review. A single GoodBed editorial review requires 50-100 hours for testing, evaluating, fact-checking, filming, writing, and editing (not to mention additional time spent sleeping on the mattress, of course).
• We cover both online and offline options. Most mattress review websites only make money if you buy online, so are quick to fill your head with biased and exaggerated claims of how much better it is to buy a mattress online. By contrast, GoodBed is committed to providing consumers with accurate information across the full landscape of purchasing options, and has created a business model that allows us to be agnostic to whether you buy online or offline.
• We are truly independent. Many mattress review sites hold themselves out to be independent and unbiased, but actually have corporate ties to a specific mattress company. By contrast, GoodBed has no such ties to any companies in the industries we cover.
• We never accept money to create reviews. We do not charge companies to review their products, nor can companies pay us to create a review. Rather, we prioritize the articles and videos we create based on input from our users.
• We never let advertising influence our editorial content. Read a few mattress reviews from so-called experts and you’re bound to see glowing pay-to-play sales pieces peppered with marketing claims regurgitated from the manufacturer. These mattress review bloggers sprang up post-Casper to make a quick buck from unwitting consumers. At GoodBed, we dedicated ourselves to fixing mattress shopping long before then, and are committed to providing consumers with trustworthy mattress information for many years to come.
• We always cover both positives and negatives. Whether in our in-depth editorial reviews or in the feedback we collect from real mattress owners, we always make sure you get the straight, unfiltered scoop. At the same time, we make a point to be fair to companies as well, so we never hesitate to give credit when we feel credit is due, and always give them a chance to tell their side of the story.
• We distinguish between fact and opinion. When mattress shopping, it’s easy to be misled by opinions like “comfortable” or personal perspectives like “good support.” The reality is that there are many mattress attributes about which your perception will vary widely from someone else’s. We know the difference and always make a point to keep this clear for our readers.
• We provide a full solution based on expertise, data, and technology. GoodBed is the only company that offers mattress shopping guidance based on a) in-depth product assessments from mattress experts, b) unbiased ratings and reviews from real mattress owners, and c) sophisticated matching software that searches across brands and stores.
• We’ve been in your shoes! Almost everyone on our staff has had some kind of bad mattress-buying experience in the past and we don’t think anyone else should! We’ve been there, and we get it…