EDITORIAL POLICY
Pure Procurement serves digitally-minded procurement practitioners. This page explains how we decide what to publish, how we make money, and the line we hold between the two.
Our reader is a working procurement professional interfacing and interested in technology: the person deploying source-to-pay systems, running category strategy, negotiating with suppliers, and living with their organization's technology decisions long after the sales cycle ends. When we weigh whether to publish something, the question we keep coming back to is a simple one.
Does this content help that person make better technology decisions? Will this make them more impactful in their work?
We write from hands-on implementation experience rather than from the sidelines, and we ask the same of our contributors.
That's our biggest differentiator when compared to other media in our space.
We work hard to stay vendor-independent. Content Partners, advertisers, and partners do not have approval rights over our conclusions.
In practice, that means a few things:
None of this makes us infallible, but it is the bar we hold ourselves to.
We think you should know how a publication is funded before you decide how much weight to give it. Here is ours, in plain terms.
Pure Procurement earns revenue through:
We do not take equity in the vendors we cover in exchange for coverage, and we do not run affiliate links dressed up as recommendations.
Some of our most useful work is done with Content Partners, and we do not think that has to be a problem, as long as it is done well.
A Content Partner Deep Dive starts with the problem and the framework, on vendor-neutral terms. The value to a procurement practitioner has to stand on its own. If a piece only makes sense if you're sold on the Content Partner, it has not done its job, for the reader or for the Content Partner. Procurement pros need to learn something actionable from our content regardless of the tech stack they have in-house.
A few ground rules:
We keep advertising and editorial separate. Buying an ad does not earn editorial coverage, and coverage is not a reward for buying an ad.
If you see a content partner highlighted in Pure Procurement material, here is what we are comfortable saying: we believe, on balance, that the provider has a good product and a capable delivery team. That belief comes from one or both of two things:
It also means we align with them on a lot of the core principles we write about here.
What it does not mean is that they are the right answer for everyone. A strong team and a strong product in one context can be the wrong choice in another. Product strengths may not align with your strategy, objectives or operating model. Delivery expertise can be unevenly distributed geographically and/or may be delegated to variable quality third-parties.
Technology and partner choices are always a question of trade-offs. It is why the "build versus buy" and "suite versus best-of-breed" debates never quite die, and why the honest answer is so often "it depends, and some kind of hybrid is probably best."
We look for partners who get that, who are honest about it and who want to help the market work through those trade-offs: where they are a good fit, and, just as usefully, where they are not.
If Content Partners cannot buy our conclusions, it is fair to ask what they are actually paying for. A few things:
In short, Content Partners fund work that genuinely helps procurement make better technology decisions, and in return they get awareness, market education, and association with ideas that matter to their ideal customer.
Our independence is part of what makes that worthwhile.
We don't publish unsourced statistics and point out research methodology when we do. We attribute data points and benchmarks to a named, verifiable source, and if we cannot stand a figure up, we would rather drop it than dress it up.
Our arguments come from practitioner experience, and we say so. When something is opinion, we frame it as opinion. When it is measured, we show our source.
Pure Procurement publishes work from outside practitioners, consultants, and technology experts through our contributor program. We ask contributors to hold to the same principles described here: practitioner-grounded, independent-minded, actionable and honest about sources. Where a contributor has a commercial relationship relevant to what they are writing about, it must be disclosed alongside the piece.
Our team works across the procurement technology industry, including consulting engagements and, for some collaborators, roles on the vendor side. Rather than pretend those relationships do not exist, we disclose the ones that could reasonably shape how you read a piece.
We get things wrong sometimes. When we do, we fix it and note what changed. If you spot an error, big or small, tell us and we will look into it. Meaningful corrections are noted on the piece rather than edited away without notice.
Questions about this policy, a specific piece of coverage, or a correction can be sent to The Pure Procurement Newsletter via [email protected].