Advertising

Where ads appear, and where they never do

Sponsored messages appear only on the free plan. If you are on a trial or you subscribe, you will not see one at all. There is no plan on which advertising follows you around: no banners, no interstitials, no tracking pixels, no ad network.

At most one sponsored mention per day, and never as the first thing in a conversation.

Every sponsored message is labelled

A sponsored mention is rendered in its own bordered card, headed SPONSORED, carrying the sponsor's real name on the link. It is never blended into Wade's own reply, and the label is stored with the message — so when you scroll back through that conversation weeks later, it is still marked as sponsored. Wade will not read a sponsored message aloud in a spoken conversation, because a spoken ad cannot carry a visible label.

What decides which sponsor you see

Sponsors register a name, a location, a link and a few interest keywords. Our own server matches those keywords against what you have talked about, and offers one sponsor to Wade, who mentions it only if it genuinely fits the conversation. Most of the time he skips it.

The limits on that matching are absolute:

Sensitive topics never target advertising. Anything about health, faith, politics, sexuality, money, grief or legal trouble — and anything mainly about another person — is flagged when it is recorded and is excluded from sponsor matching at the point the data is read, not by anyone remembering to be careful. This holds for everything you say to Wade, without exception. The one place your politics can affect which sponsor you see is a questionnaire you fill in yourself, switch on yourself, and can delete — see Political sponsors below.
You can turn personalisation off. Account → Sponsors. Sponsors then match on the language you are learning alone. The support model doesn't change; only the personalisation stops.
Your post code. A sponsor that serves particular post codes reaches only learners in them. It is required in the US and optional elsewhere, and it is used for exactly that — matching local sponsors. (The privacy law that applies to you is decided by your country and state, not your post code.) It is never sent to the sponsor, and it's editable in Account.
Wade is never paid to have an opinion. Sponsors cannot buy a place in the lesson itself — which words you are taught, what he corrects, or what he recommends outside the labelled card.

What a sponsor receives about you

Nothing. No name, no email, no device id, no conversation, no interests, no advertising identifier. We do not send your personal information to advertisers, ad networks or data brokers, and we do not sell or share it. Because sponsor selection happens entirely on our own servers, nothing about you leaves them for advertising purposes.

Sponsors get aggregate delivery figures for a date range, and only these:

how many times their message was shown;
how many people tapped it;
how many distinct learners saw it, as a number.

The reach figure is counted inside our database and reduced to a count before it leaves — a sponsor report cannot name an audience even in principle. If you tap a sponsored link, you leave for the sponsor's own site, where their privacy policy applies and not ours.

Political sponsors

We do accept candidates and campaigns, under rules tighter than anything else on this page:

United States only, and only where we know the state you live in. If we don't know where you are, you never see one.
Not in Washington, Maryland, New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. Those states place disclosure and public-archive duties on the platform running the ad. Those are obligations we are not resourced to meet properly, and we would rather decline the money than do that job badly.
You can switch them off entirely. Account → Election & campaign messages. That declines the whole category — no candidates, no campaigns, targeted or not — and it doesn't change anything else about your free plan.
Every political mention names who paid for it, verbatim, on the card. We won't register a political sponsor without that line.
Never spoken aloud — like every sponsored message, and it matters more here: a spoken ad can't carry a visible label.
No post-code targeting. Geographic micro-targeting of candidates is a practice we've chosen to stay out of.

By default, a campaign knows nothing about your politics

If you do nothing, the political messages you see are untargeted. A campaign reaches you because you live in a state it is running in — that is the entire basis. We hold no view about your politics, we have not guessed at one, and nothing you have said to Wade played any part. It works the way a billboard works.

If you would rather see ones closer to your own views

There is a switch for that, off unless you turn it on, and it is the only thing on this site that asks about your politics. Turn it on and we ask six questions about where you stand on things like tax, regulation and immigration, plus which issues matter to you. From those answers we work out roughly where you sit, and campaigns can ask to reach that range. Change an answer and it changes; switch it off and both the answers and the reading are deleted.

We ask about positions rather than asking you to pick a label, because labels are a poor measure — people under-report the ends of the scale and “moderate” gets claimed by almost everyone. Asking what you actually think is both more accurate and less loaded.

For the same reason we don't display the result back to you in the app: a figure on screen is a figure to aim at, and we would end up measuring how you want to be seen rather than what you said. It is still your data — ask us and we will tell you exactly what we hold, which is your six answers and the range they average to.

Nothing you say to Wade is ever used to match a political sponsor. Not what you said about the news, not your job, not where you were last week — none of it, whether flagged sensitive or not. A language lesson is not a focus group, and the only thing a campaign can reach you through is a form you knowingly filled in. That is a stricter rule than the one covering ordinary sponsors, deliberately.

Your answers stay on our servers. Campaigns choose which leanings and issues they want to reach and are told how many people saw the message — never who, and never what anyone answered.

Who we will take money from

We are a small company choosing sponsors by hand. We will not run advertising for gambling, weapons, tobacco or vaping, adult content, payday or high-interest lending, miracle health claims, cryptocurrency speculation, or anything aimed at children. We will decline anything that would be embarrassing to see next to a language lesson.

Questions, or a sponsored message that felt wrong

Tell us: ads@lc.wading.ai. If a mention seemed off-topic, poorly timed, or as though it knew something it shouldn't, we want to hear about it specifically — that is the kind of report that changes the rules above.