How We Make Money
At SwitchUp, we believe in transparency. This means all of our advertisements are clearly marked, and we want to make sure you understand how we choose our advertising partners and how we make money.
We make money through inquiry generation. This means that bootcamps pay us to appear in various advertising placements across our site (marked with the word "Advertisement or "Ad") and if a user clicks on an advertising school, they will have the option to submit a form requesting that a representative of the school contact them with more information. Submitting this form creates an "inquiry", which the school pays us for, since inquiries can turn into future enrollments at these bootcamps.
This keeps our content free for you. All content on our site is completely free and accessible without a log-in. You can navigate through our entire website without ever having to submit an inquiry for an advertising partner.
How we choose our partners. Most advertising partners reach out to us for advertising opportunities. Partner bootcamps are required to keep all of their data they provide to SwitchUp up-to-date and accurate to maintain partnerships. SwitchUp will also make individual decisions to not work with an advertising partner if we have any concerns about integrity or quality (for either the education offerings or the business partnership) or if maintaining the relationship does not make financial sense.
What we won't do for partners. We will never alter any review data that we collect from students and graduates, including removing negative reviews that meet our review guidelines. You'll often see this data represented as a Recommendation Rate or a star rating. Lastly, our advertising partnerships have no influence on the bootcamp rankings we publish. Advertising partners are evaluated in the exact same manner using the exact same data sources as non-partner bootcamps, and if a partner bootcamp does objectively qualify for a ranking, we still indicate the partnership status via an info icon.
What we do with our revenue. We use our revenue to support the team behind SwitchUp, to invest in building more great content for our products, to compensate expert writers and contributors, and to support our large data research efforts.
Additionally, since 2010, our parent company Optimal has used a portion of all of its websites' revenue to fund its scholarship program, which has now awarded over $915,000 directly to college students with high financial need. Optimal also provides a charitable matching benefit to employees, with the company matching up to $2,000 per employee from the company's revenue to the non-profit of the employee's choice. Lastly, Optimal has supported Northwest Education Access, a local non-profit whose mission is to help low-income students successfully enroll and complete higher education, since 2010 with annual donations.
