Operator and advertiser terms

Who these terms are for

These terms are for people who run a UK prize competition site that is listed on CompWatch and who claim that listing, use the free operator portal, take part in an operator interview or buy a featured placement. They sit alongside our general Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy. If they disagree about something covered here, these terms win.

CompWatch is run by Elow Development, a sole trader based in the United Kingdom ("we", "us"). "You" means the operator, and the person who accepts these terms for it. By claiming a listing, using the portal or buying a placement you confirm that you are acting for the purposes of your business and that you have authority to bind it.

Listings do not depend on you

We list UK competition sites from information they publish, whether or not they have claimed their listing. Claiming a listing, using the portal or buying a placement is never needed to be listed, and it never changes how we treat the listing.

Claiming your listing

You can claim a listing only for a site you own or are authorised to manage. You must have a CompWatch account with a verified email address. We then check that you control the site, either automatically when your verified email address is on the site's own domain, or by emailing a six-digit code to an address on that domain. We may refuse, withhold or remove a claim if we think it is not genuine, and we may ask for more proof.

• Keep your login details secure. You are responsible for what is done through your account.
• Do not claim, or pretend to be, a site you are not authorised to represent.
• If you stop being authorised to manage the site, tell us and release the claim. Deleting your account also releases the claim.

The free operator portal

The operator portal is free for every claimed site. It shows how your draws sell against your usual, the visitors CompWatch sends you, the market you trade in (including up to 10 rival operators you choose to follow), help planning your next draw, your trust profile, and a way to ask us for a review. We may add, change or remove features at any time and we do not promise that it will always be available or error free.

Data and analytics are estimates

The figures in the portal, the weekly summary and any other report are estimates. They are built from what we read from public pages at intervals (from about every 15 minutes to every few hours, depending on the site), so they can be late, incomplete or wrong. Forecasts and plans are based on how comparable draws sold in the past and are not a promise of how yours will sell. Clicks and visits are counted by our own rules, which filter out crawlers and repeat clicks, so they will not match your own analytics. Do not rely on our figures for accounts, contracts, regulatory returns or any other formal purpose, and check important facts against your own records.

What you may do with portal data

You may use portal data, exports and emails for your own business. You must not:

• Resell, license, publish or share portal data or exports with anyone else, or use them to build a product or dataset for others.
• Scrape, crawl or systematically extract data from the portal or the rest of the site, or use automated tools to do so.
• Present our figures as your own audited results or imply we have endorsed you.
• Use rival data to harass, defame or mislead anyone.

Information about rivals comes from the same public sources as the rest of the site.

Trust grades and independence

Trust grades (A+ to F) are our independent assessment. You cannot buy a grade, and you cannot change one by paying us, advertising with us, taking part in an interview or any other commercial arrangement. A grade reflects what an operator publishes and does, such as its terms, company details, published odds, free entry route and how winners are chosen. It is our opinion, based on the information we have at the time, and it can be wrong or out of date. How we assess operators is explained on our How we rate page, and we may change the method from time to time.

If you think something about your grade is wrong, or you have changed something we should look at again, you can use the Trust page in the portal to dispute an indicator or ask for a re-evaluation, and you can follow the progress of your request there. We will review it fairly, but the decision is ours, and a review can leave your grade the same or change it in either direction. We do not promise a review time. Grades are shown whether or not you have claimed your listing.

Featured placements: what you buy

A featured placement is a monthly subscription, paid through PayPal, at a flat fee of £99 a month. There are no per-click charges. The price you join at stays the same for as long as your subscription continues without a break; we may charge a different price to new subscribers.

While your placement is running, one competition of yours that you choose is shown as a featured card in these places:

• the spotlight in the homepage hero;
• a top-row slot on the Competitions page; and
• a top-row slot on the matching category page.

The card shows your live competition data (price, odds, time left and tickets sold, as we read them) and your trust grade. It carries a clear "Featured · paid placement" label so that visitors know it is promotion. You can change which of your live competitions is featured whenever you like from the portal.

We keep the number of advertisers small (at most 3 at a time). Each page view shows one featured competition, rotated as evenly as we reasonably can between active placements. If all places are taken you can join a waiting list.

Featured placements: eligibility

To buy and keep a placement, your listing must have a published trust grade of B or above and at least one live competition with an end date. We can check this at any time. If your grade falls below the minimum, we pause your placement automatically and email you. It does not restart by itself: once your grade is back at or above the minimum, choose a competition on the Advertise page of the portal to restart it. Your subscription keeps being billed while a placement is paused, unless you cancel it. We can also decline or end a placement at our discretion if we think it would be unfair to visitors or damage the site. This includes operators that are under investigation by a regulator or that we have good reason to think are not running genuine competitions.

Featured placements: your wording and artwork

You may replace the prize text (up to 120 characters) and upload your own image (JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 2MB) for your featured card. This only changes the featured card. It does not change how the competition appears anywhere else on the site. Your changes go live as soon as you save them, without us reviewing them first, so you are responsible for them.

You promise that your wording and artwork:

• accurately describe the competition that is featured, including its prize, and are not misleading;
• comply with the law and with the rules that apply to your advertising, such as consumer protection law and the advertising codes;
• do not infringe anyone else's rights, and you have the right to use any names, logos, images and prizes shown; and
• contain nothing offensive, unlawful or harmful.

You keep ownership of your wording and artwork. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, host, resize, display and distribute them on and around CompWatch (including our file storage and caches) for as long as they are used for your placement, and for a short time afterwards while copies clear from caches and backups. If you replace or remove your artwork we delete the previous file.

We can remove or revert your wording or artwork at any time, with or without notice, if we think it is misleading, does not match the competition, is unlawful or breaks these terms. The card then falls back to the details we read from your site. We keep a record of changes.

Featured placements: rotation and pausing

When the competition you have featured ends, your placement moves automatically to your next live competition and we email you. If you have no other live competition, the placement is paused and we email you, and it stays paused until you pick one. A placement is also paused if your grade falls below the minimum (see above), and we can take it down under these terms. Billing carries on while a placement is paused for any of these reasons, unless you cancel.

If payment for a renewal fails, we keep your place for a grace period of about a week, send you reminders, and try to collect the outstanding amount. If it is still unpaid after that, we cancel the subscription and give your place to someone else. You can then buy a new placement if one is available.

Featured placements: cancelling and refunds

You can cancel at any time, in one of two ways, and they work differently:

• Cancel on the Advertise page of the portal. This cancels your PayPal subscription, so no further payments are taken, and it ends your placement straight away. The rest of the period you have already paid for is not refunded.
• Cancel in your PayPal account. This also stops further payments, and your placement carries on until the end of the period you have already paid for.

We do not refund the part of a period you have already paid for, except as set out below or where the law says we must.

• If we pause or remove your placement for our own reasons (for example a fault on our side, or we take the feature down), we will add the lost days to the end of your paid period or, if you would rather, refund that part of the fee through PayPal.
• If the placement is paused or removed for a reason on your side (for example your grade falls below the minimum, your artwork or wording breaks these terms, or payment fails), no extension or refund is due, although you can cancel at any time to stop further charges.
• If a placement was never delivered because of a mistake on our side, we will refund that payment in full.

To raise a problem, email [email protected]. PayPal's own terms apply to the payment itself. We never see your card details.

Featured placements: no guarantee of results

We do not promise any number of impressions, clicks, entries or sales, or any particular position, share of rotation or time on screen. The impressions, clicks and click-through rate shown in the portal are our own counts and follow the rules described above. They are provided to help you judge the value of the placement and are not a basis for any claim against us.

Featured placements and independence

A featured placement is advertising. It is always labelled as paid. It does not change your trust grade, and it does not change where you appear in search, sorting or rankings anywhere else on the site. Buying a placement does not buy a review or any special treatment in how we assess operators, and we will not describe your site as endorsed by us because you advertise.

Other advertising

Any other kind of paid promotion on the site is arranged individually and in writing, and these terms apply to it unless we agree otherwise in that writing.

Operator interviews

Operator interviews are optional and free. They are available to operators that meet the minimum grade shown in the portal, and taking part does not affect your trust grade either way. You film short answers to our questions and send them to us. We edit them together and send you a private preview. Nothing is published until you tell us it can go live, and you can ask for changes.

When you send us a recording, photo or transcript, you confirm that you have the right to do so and that anyone who appears in it knows it will be published. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to edit, caption, publish and promote it on CompWatch and our channels. You can ask us to take your interview down at any time and we will remove it within a reasonable time.

Emails to operators

• Weekly summary. A Monday email about your week. It may open with a short recap written by an AI model from your own figures. We check the recap before it is sent, and we send the summary without it if the check fails. You can stop the summary with the unsubscribe link in the email or in the portal.
• Rival alerts. Alerts about changes to rivals you follow. You choose whether to receive them and can turn them off at any time.
• Service emails. Account, verification, trust review, payment and placement notices (for example a rotation or payment reminder). We send these because they are part of the service, so you cannot switch them off while the matter is live.
• Introductions. We sometimes write to a listed operator's public contact address to tell it about the free portal or interviews. Every such email says how to stop further ones, and if you reply asking us to stop, we will.

Your information

How we use personal data about you and your colleagues is set out in our Privacy Policy. If you send us personal data about other people (for example in an interview or a message to us), you confirm you may lawfully do so.

Our responsibility to you

The portal, the data in it and the placements are provided "as is". We take reasonable care, but we do not promise that anything will be uninterrupted, error free or suitable for your purposes. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable to you for any loss of profit, revenue, sales, goodwill or data, or for any indirect or consequential loss, arising from the portal, the data, a grade or a placement.

Our total liability to you for everything connected with these terms in any 12 months is limited to the fees you paid us in that period, or £100 if you paid nothing. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

You are responsible for the competitions you run and for your own wording and artwork. You will cover our reasonable losses and costs if a third party brings a claim against us because your wording, artwork or interview material was unlawful or infringed their rights.

Ending these terms

You can stop at any time by cancelling your subscription (if you have one) and deleting your account. We cannot delete an account that still has an active featured placement subscription, so cancel that first. We can suspend or end your access, placement or claim if you break these terms, if we think a claim is not genuine, or if we stop offering a feature. When these terms end, your placement stops and the licences above end, apart from the short period for caches and backups. Sections that are meant to carry on, such as the liability limits and governing law, will do so.

Changes

We may update these terms. We will show the date of the latest update at the top of this page, and we will email portal users about material changes. If you are on a paid placement and do not agree to a change, you can cancel before it takes effect. Continued use after the change means you accept it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute about them.

Contact

Questions about these terms or your listing: [email protected].