Steve,

Thank you for your question and as you probably guesses that this gets asked quite frequently.

Some 5 or 6 years ago the Editor of NCR – Carolinas News Network was a homeowner like yourself, seeking to find the best product for his home, and a product that is truly good not just because the salesmen says it is.

An article was written about gutter covers and some basic testing was done to reveal the dirty secrets about the gutter cover industry. This article brought nationwide attention and a bunch of letters from lawyers that represented the various systems that were discussed – demanding that NCR sensor the articles and names of products. NCR decided that because all of the great efforts to sensor this information, it was there 1st amendment patriotic duty as journalists to expose the gutter guard industry in the way that would reach the most readers and so GutterProtectionReview.org was launched.

To generate revenue we attempted at using traditional adds from the ad networks that NCR relies on, however soon discovered that the ads were of a very deceptive nature and in some ways defeated our goals of this site. So we pulled the plug on the ads and operated in the red for a few years.

Throughout the time of operating this site we were asked many times for a referral to a quality installer – although we only knew a NC local installer that did fantastic work and received much customer praise – our site was attracting a much larger national presence – so we decided that it would add value to our readers to provide a referral service (much like angies list ) for good installers of gutter products – thus we launched the NCR Verified installer program where the installers paid us an application fee that we used to check public records and do preliminary research about them, then the dealers would pay a small monthly fee to stay on and so long as they provided a valuable service to our readers at a fair price they stayed on the our referral list, if the installer failed to deliver to the customer we would kick them off. This worked and continues to work as the installers needs customers and customers want good service and the incentive for the installer to perform a quality service is present as the consequence of not providing it would be the loss of our readers to them. We view this as fair, and hope you see it the same as this referral service provides us no incentive to favor one brand to the other and therefore has no effect on any results that we publish. Moreover it provides us an incentive to keep searching and testing for the best product.

More recently we launched a research portion where companies or individuals could purchase detailed reports about the industry – although this service is very new, we are hoping that manufacturers and inventors of gutter guards would purchase our research documents to help them create and engineer better gutter protection products.

We are continuing to experiment with various ways to generate income to support our efforts in reviewing the gutter cover industry and in such we always do so in in the most ethical way that would not compromise our reputation – and our strong reputation is inherently linked to the trust of our readers if we lose the trust of our readers then everything we have done and would do would be in vain.

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