AI imagery & funding
Exactly how our images are made, and exactly how this site earns money today.
Every illustration on this site is AI-created — every hero, every in-article figure, every card thumbnail. The single exception is the editor's portrait on the author page, which is a likeness of a real person and is not an editorial illustration. None of them are photographs.
We are putting this first because it matters more than the money.
Every image on Hiddencorners — every hero, every in-article figure, every thumbnail — is an interpretive editorial illustration created in-house using AI image tools whose terms permit commercial use. None of it is photography. None of it was taken at the location it accompanies.
What that means for you as a traveller
- These are not real-time images. They show nothing about conditions today.
- They do not depict actual current cave, road, ice or trail conditions at any location.
- They must never be used for navigation, route-finding or hazard assessment. A cave in one of our illustrations is not a cave you can plan around.
- Confirm real conditions with official sources and qualified local guides. Every dossier links to them.
Why we work this way
- We never take another photographer's work. Travel media runs on borrowed and scraped imagery.
- We refuse the standard lie. The common alternative is to buy a stock photograph of one valley and caption it as another. That is legal, ubiquitous, and dishonest. We would rather tell you plainly that what you are looking at is an illustration.
A disclosure appears at the top of every article, in the alt text of every illustration, and in the footer of every page. Where you need to see what a place really looks like, the Sources list at the foot of each dossier will take you to people who were actually there.
How Hiddencorners is funded — today
By clearly labelled display advertising, and by nothing else.
- Display advertising, served by Google AdSense. It is labelled, it is kept out of the editorial process, and it is the only source of income this site has.
- No sponsorships.
- No affiliate links, anywhere on the site.
- No free products, press trips or hosted travel — which is straightforward, since our dossiers are desk-researched and we do not take trips at all.
- No paywall, no subscriptions, no reader donations.
Hiddencorners takes no sponsorship and carries no affiliate links, and there is no plan to introduce either. This page is updated whenever a monetisation relationship becomes active — before it goes live, not after.
What is true about advertising here
- Every ad unit is labelled Advertisement or Sponsored.
- Ads are visually distinct from editorial and will never imitate our typography.
- Ad slots have reserved height, so the page never shifts under your thumb and causes an accidental click.
- No ads over navigation, no ads disguised as buttons, no pop-unders, no auto-playing audio.
- Articles will not be overloaded; the content-to-ad balance stays weighted to content.
- Affiliate links, if used, will be marked at the point of use and above the link — not only on this page.
What a commercial relationship will never buy
- Advance sight of a dossier.
- The ability to commission, kill or amend coverage.
- Any influence on a Silence Index score.
- Positive coverage. A commercial relationship does not guarantee — and will never guarantee — a favourable write-up, and any relationship that could reasonably be read as a conflict will be disclosed inside the article it affects.