Last updated on June 6, 2019
As longtime champions of transparency in the mattress industry, we try to be 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.
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 robust website – including our rich database, intelligent 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 to support our work.
As a marketplace, GoodBed publishes links to products offered for sale at hundreds of different websites and thousands of brick & mortar stores. 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 at no cost to you.
Like other trusted marketplaces such as Amazon or TripAdvisor, we aim to have advertising relationships with a very broad base of companies. Without the pressure to favor a limited group of advertisers, we can focus first and foremost on helping our readers search across the many available options to find the best products 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. For example, GoodBed is 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 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 back with our readers. For example, to help our readers save money when shopping at trusted local stores, we partner with select retailers to offer our readers a Cash Back program. To participate, retailers can apply to become one of our Trusted Partners. If accepted, they agree to pay GoodBed a referral fee for sending you their way – which we then share with you as Cash Back.
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 3rd party such as Google AdSense, in which case we have no control at all over what ads will be shown to a given user.
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”).
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.
In most cases, a manufacturer will send us a sample mattress to test, knowing that our reviews are independent and critical, and are highly valued by our readers. Beyond shipping the mattress to us, mattress companies don’t participate in the review process at all.
We also do not review every mattress offered to us. Performing an in-depth editorial review to our standards requires 50-100 hours of work. Given the time and expense we put into each review, we make sure to prioritize them based on input from our readers.
After reviewing a mattress, we first attempt to donate it to a local charity. If that isn’t possible (many charities cannot accept used mattresses, especially in California), our company policy is to sell the mattress locally and donate the proceeds to charities or other non-profit organizations in our community. In this way, we can ensure that GoodBed does not benefit from the free mattresses we receive.
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.
To this end, 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 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.
GoodBed is a completely independent, privately held company. Our majority owner is our founder, Michael Magnuson. Our minority investors are individuals who have no outside affiliation with any companies in the industries covered by 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.
