National Hearing InstituteIndependent Hearing Health Research

Affiliate & Editorial Disclosure

Last reviewed: May 24, 2026 by Dr Jeffrey Smith, AuD, Editor-in-Chief.

In short

National Hearing Institute is reader-supported. Some of the over-the-counter hearing aid products we name in our editorial articles are sold by companies that pay us a commission when readers buy through our links. This disclosure explains what those relationships are, what they do not influence, and how we keep our research and rankings honest.

How we make money

NHI is a small, independently operated publisher. We do not sell hearing aids ourselves. We earn revenue in two ways:

  • Affiliate commissions. When a reader clicks through from one of our articles to a retailer or brand and purchases a product, that company may pay us a referral fee. The price you pay is the same whether you click through NHI or arrive at the retailer directly.
  • Display advertising (limited). We occasionally run programmatic display ads sold by independent ad networks. These do not influence editorial decisions and are never disguised as content.

Brands we have affiliate relationships with

At time of writing, NHI has an affiliate relationship with the following over-the-counter hearing aid brand:

  • Panda Hearing (pandahearing.com) — Panda Stealth, Panda Air, and Panda Quantum. All three are FDA-registered OTC hearing aids.

If we add or remove a brand from this list, we will update this page and date the change.

What our affiliate relationships do not influence

This is the part that matters. Affiliate income pays our bills, but it does not buy editorial coverage or favorable framing. Specifically:

  • Our research articles and guides are written to answer the reader's question accurately. They cite primary sources (peer-reviewed studies, FDA decisions, NIDCD data, the WHO World Report on Hearing) and they do not insert product recommendations into clinical explanations.
  • Our rankings framework is published, public, and applied consistently. No brand can pay to be ranked, pay to be re-ranked, or pay to be removed.
  • Our editor-in-chief, Dr Jeffrey Smith, AuD, reviews every article for clinical accuracy. He is not paid by any hearing aid brand.
  • Where we name a product as an example in an article, the product is identified as a "Notable example on the market" with a clear disclosure block above the article body. The product appears because it illustrates the editorial point being made (e.g., "a 16-channel rechargeable OTC device with a self-fitting test"), not because it pays us.

Why we name products at all

Readers consistently tell us that the most useful thing a hearing-aid article can do is point them at real, currently available products that match the concept being explained. An article about self-fitting OTC hearing aids that never names a self-fitting OTC hearing aid is, in practice, less useful than one that does.

So we name them, in a labelled section near the bottom of the article, with their price and what they actually do. We try to be specific about who each product is and is not for. If we know of a meaningfully different competitor, we will say so — even if we do not have an affiliate relationship with them.

How to identify a product link

Any link that earns NHI a commission is tagged in the HTML with rel="sponsored" — the standard Google attribute that flags an affiliate link. Hovering over the link in most browsers shows the destination URL. We never use link cloaking or redirect chains designed to hide where a link goes.

If you spot a problem

If you believe an article gives a misleading impression about a product, includes an outdated price, or fails to disclose a relationship, email us at editor@nationalhearinginstitute.org. Corrections are published on the page where the original claim appeared, with the date of the change.

Related

One last note. The cleanest test of whether an editorial firewall is working is to read the article without the product section and ask whether the recommendation in the product section would change if the affiliate disappeared. If the answer is no — if the article would still make the same clinical and consumer points either way — the firewall is doing its job. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.