Privacytools.io to add affiliate links / paid listings

I just wanted to get all your opinions on the hypothetical possibility of using affiliate/referral links to the tools/services we recommend when applicable. For example, Brave is giving away $5/referral until the end of this year. Because of our recommendation of Brave's browser currently, we're sending hundreds of users to their site every month. Presumably that's big business for Brave, and for the other tools we recommend, but financially we aren't compensated for any of that.

This of course, is in line with our original priotities when the site was founded. We don't have affiliate links and we don't accept payments from the teams behind the software we recommend in exchange for highlights or recommendations. privacytools.io is supposed to be a completely unbiased source of information on how to protect your privacy, not a list of companies who are able to pay the most. We already have Google for that.

However, I don't think the use of affiliate links is inherently unethical.

Here's the thing. If you don't trust us (the team and the community of contributors here) to not shove BS in your face when you visit our site, then what are we even doing here? Ultimately we're making these recommendations to a wide audience, and whether or not we're using affiliate links or 'clean' links shouldn't matter. If you would stop trusting privacytools.io as a source of information because we used an affiliate link then IMO we have already failed. I would hope that you would be able to trust the intentions of us simply because you trust in what we do. Because we value our community and audience far more than we value the couple bucks we'd get from a referral, and we'd never attach our name to something we didn't believe in, in the first place.

A larger source of income would of course benefit us in a number of ways.

1. Core team members will be able to focus more on this project. Keeping the site up to date and promoting it across various platforms takes
2. We're now offering some online services which cost quite a bit more to operate than a simple website. Things that directly benefit and build both our community ( forum , chat , write , social ), and things that benefit the privacy communities and the federated communities at large even indirectly, for example a public Mastodon instance, a Tor relay , and a public IPFS gateway ( ipfs.privacytools.io ) to name a few. These are IMO important things we're providing, and being able to provide them on a larger and/or more stable scale would be hugely beneficial.
3. More income would make it more feasible to work on larger operations some people have been pushing for, like legal incorporation ( #899 ) for tax-deductible donations and more services that directly help activists . Which would in turn lead to more income, which would assist with 1 and 2 and so on...

Additionally, long-term we are interested in paying other team members and Git contributors for their efforts, but at our current rate of income that isn't feasible.

Ultimately we aren't starved for income necessarily. The website and services will continue running without this additional funding. But I think that if we were to use affiliate links we would ultimately be able to build a better infrastructure, more stable services, and honestly just be able to focus more on this project and help it expand.

So here's the question(s)

Would you stop trusting privacytools.io if this were to happen?

Do you mistrust recommendations tied to an affiliate link in general?

What kind of proper disclosure if any should be implemented if we did this?

I want to hear your thoughts on this. This is something that's been bounced around a couple times in the past, but community trust is always the most important aspect of this, otherwise there's no point to working on this at all.