Advertising Policy for ePals, Inc.

ePals is committed to engaging in the advertising marketplace in a responsible manner that illustrates our commitment to maintaining high quality educational services for children, parents and teachers. These advertising policy principles will remain an important foundation to our business and are intended to ensure that advertising enhances rather than undermines ePals' products and services.

I. Types of Advertisements

ePals believes that advertising can be acceptable in a variety of formats if appropriately labeled so as to be clear and transparent to all users (i.e., children and adults). Advertisements may be displayed in: banners, web pages, widgets; links; feeds and newsletters that may be communicated through email and other email functionality. ePals may also include appropriate advertisements in mini-sites and contests.

In addition, ePals will seek to enter into relationships with corporate underwriters that will become sponsors of individual areas within our family of sites or for specific content initiatives. These sponsorships will provide corporations or their foundations the opportunity to build brand identity and awareness by identifying their brands and products with proven educational products and services.

II. Advertising Content

ePals intends to follow the industry's "best practices" as they are defined and evolve. ePals, Inc. will carefully consider the content of advertising on its family of sites, ensuring that advertising on its sites will not undermine the company's educational products or services.

  1. Unsafe Products Ban: Recognizing that a large percentage of our users will be children, ePals, Inc. will not accept advertisements, either directly or indirectly though 3rd party ad servers, for products that are unsafe for children. These products include tobacco, alcohol, firearms and adult content. ePals, Inc. will not accept ads that it, in its sole discretion, deems inappropriate for children, even if those advertisements do fall within the general definition of "safe".
  2. "Safe" Product Advertisements: Careful attention will be paid to all products promoted by ePals and the context of these advertisements to ensure they are not inappropriate for our audience segments (including children). We will work with our advertising partners to ensure that no advertisement is misleading or confusing and that no product or service targeted to children of a certain age is portrayed as being appropriate for children of younger ages. Examples include ensuring that toys for older children are not portrayed as being used by young children and snack foods are not portrayed as making up "healthy" full meals for any children.
  3. Brand or Product Restrictions: In an effort to ensure that no advertisement undermines the content on our sites or our corporate mission, ePals may, from time to time, deem certain brands or products unacceptable for advertising on our site. In general, ePals will endeavor to partner with companies and institution that are supportive of our mission and purpose.
  4. Competitor Restrictions: ePals reserves the right to prevent advertisements from appearing on our sites that are from direct competitors.

III. Advertising Formats

In addition to the above, ePals, Inc. will regulate formats and context in a variety of ways, for example:

  1. Rules for Clearly Delineating Ads: Advertisements on ePals will be clearly delineated from content offerings regardless of the format in which they are being served. Specific guidelines include, for example, framing and/or delineating advertisements to ensure it is clear to our user segment when they are viewing or interacting with content and when they are viewing or interacting with advertisements.
  2. Multi-Media Advertisements: ePals reserves the right to restrict or prevent advertising pop-ups, extreme animation and takeovers, sound and video ads and other advertisements that use multi-media formats that potential degrade user experience or the integrity of our service.
  3. Click-Through Statement: ePals makes efforts to link to appropriate outside sites for kids; however ePals is not responsible for click-through destinations, pages or content. Our policies do not apply to third party sites. If ePals offers any product for purchase, either through a "click here to order" button or other onscreen means, the ordering instructions will clearly and prominently state that a child must have a parent's permission to order.

IV. Advertising Targeting

In accordance with our privacy policy and to ensure compliance with the law, under no circumstances will targeting of any advertisements to users be based on the collection of personally identifiable information (such as name, address, email address, or telephone number) ("PII") received by ePals during the registration process unless ePals receives prior notice and consent from adult users or an authorized person with respect to children under the age of 13. ePals does use third-party advertising companies to serve ads. These companies may use anonymous information (but not PII) about your ePals visits to serve advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest.

Disclaimer: This policy is subject to the ePals Terms of Use and may change at ePals discretion.