TIC’s mission is to deepen our collective financial understanding of the world through human storytelling, knowledge-sharing, and personal expression.
We value thoughtful, nuanced, knowledgeable perspectives — and know readers do, too. That’s why elevating quality is one of our most important jobs.
Our team reviews stories daily to identify the best of the best to distribute further across TIC’s network: the homepage, emails, apps, and more. This gives a distributed story a greater chance of being seen by more readers, helping writers and publications gain more visibility and audience.
Stories on TIC fall into one of three platform distribution categories:
Distributed —posts selected by the TIC curation team to get distributed in larger scale via other TICs.
General Distribution—posts that are seeing the benefit the natural SEO and TIC internal team work.
TIC Turnup—posts that are selected by the TIC curation team to turnup in certain forms of paid promotion.
All stories on TIC, regardless of the category above, are available to readers via direct links, search engines, social media, and other forms of off-TIC distribution.
Continue reading for more details about the guidelines for each of these categories.
Turnup Guidelines
In deciding which stories to Turnup, we look for those that help readers deepen their understanding of themselves, others, their endeavors, financial literacy, and making their money work for them.
These stories can come in almost any form: nonfiction, fiction, personal essay, memoir, tutorial, and a myriad of other possibilities too numerous to mention. (When we say “post”, we mean a work of any form created by a writer on TIC.)
A story need not exemplify every one of these elements to be Turned up. We interpret these elements in a broad, nuanced sense — not as a checklist of requirements, but as a target to shoot for. We’re looking for posts that we’re especially proud to put in front of TIC readers. Here’s a more detailed look at what we look for:
Post Content
Is the reader’s life enriched by reading the story?
Stories selected for Turnup might elicit emotions like laughter, tears, excitement, wonder, and more. Or they might help a reader learn something that will help them do their job better, master a new skill, lend words and understanding to better understand issues of the day, reconsider their own perspectives. Whatever the genre, there’s a relationship between readers and writers, and Turnup-worthy stories exemplify respect for that relationship; the reader is not left with a sense that their time has been used to read a sales pitch or to indulge a writer’s bid for attention. The story shows genuine regard for the reader (as opposed to being written mainly for the benefit of the writer).
Is it original, human-created content?
The story is original in that it explores something previously unknown or not frequently examined, or it re-examines something we think we know a lot about to shed new light, voice, or perspective on the topic. The story does not appear to be generated by a large language model or other text-generating technology. (The story does not need to be originally published on TIC—see more here about republishing from your blog or other site.)
Author’s Experience
Does the author speak from relevant knowledge and experience?
The story demonstrates that the author has credible, first-hand experience with or knowledge about this subject, and they care deeply about communicating it effectively. That may be because they’re a subject matter expert or because of their lived experience. One way or another, there’s a clear and compelling reason why this particular author is writing about this particular topic—their insights (whether revealed in the context of fiction or nonfiction) reflect relevant experience.
Craftsmanship
Is the story well-crafted?
The story is well-written, free of errors, appropriately sourced, and narratively strong. The content, editorial choices, and central point of the post are clear and compelling. The length of the story is appropriate and serves the purpose and context of the story itself (well-crafted stories can be short or long). The writer has worked to craft an interesting, non-clickbait title and the story delivers on what that title promises. Images, if any, add value to the story, include ALT text to make them more accessible, and are appropriately credited. Formatting used correctly is one of many indicators of a writer taking care to craft their work
Does the post have impact?
We’re looking for the kind of posts that you’re still thinking about days later. Are you compelled to share this with your network? Did this story get you thinking? Move you? Make you feel good about the value of your TIC community? Are you glad you read it? This type of impact is another facet of craftsmanship and applies whether the topic is universally appealing or totally niche, for stories of any genre or that defy genre.
General Distribution
General Distribution is the default for posts published on TIC.
Posts are eligible for general distribution across the TIC network—website, apps, topic pages,—so long as they do not violate our distribution standards or site rules.
These posts are distributed to all readers.
General Distrubtion only restriction
Posts that are reviewed and found to contain any of the characteristics below are restricted.
They are not distributed
Readers can also find them via links shared on other platforms, search engines, social media, and more.
These types of stories are not banned on TIC (they don’t violate TIC’s rules)—they simply don’t get distributed to readers beyond the general distribution.
These elements can cause a story to be set to Network Only:
- Clickbait (including visual clickbait)
- Un-constructive negativity, like outrage porn, sensationalism
- Ad-hominem attacks or rebuttals (call-out posts); inflammatory attacks on individuals or businesses
- Reputation-laundering
- Posts that offer the reader little and have a primary point of gathering signups/traffic, selling something, or soliciting donations, including sponsored content and content marketing.
- TIC is not a place for fully AI-generated stories, and 100% AI-generated stories will not be eligible for distribution beyond the writer’s personal network.
We currently allow the responsible use of AI-assistive technology on TIC. To promote transparency, and help set reader expectations, we require that any story incorporating AI assistance be clearly labeled as such. AI-assisted text without a disclosure at the beginning of the story (within the first two paragraphs), or other AI-generated content not labeled as such (for example, AI-generated images should include captioning identifying them as such, along with proper sourcing) will similarly be restricted to distribution on the writer’s personal network. - Crypto airdrops
- Use of copyrighted images without permission— writers and publications should use original images or images they have the right to use, and should cite their sources.
- Link farms
- Stories with unverified claims that could be dangerous, illegal, or cause harm, including health, public health or mental health claims; claims that lack sufficient evidence or manipulate otherwise widely accepted information
- Stories about TIC—see below for more details on this.
Of course, stories that violate TIC Rules are also not eligible for distribution to TIC’s network. If you are surprised to see something missing in the guidelines above, it’s probably because that’s a rules violation that will get a post and/or writer completely removed.
Special Situations and Exceptions Meta-TIC Stories
Posts about the partner program, making money on TIC, or Turnup itself are set to General Distribution only. This is how we prevent readers from being overrun by these stories; readers have repeatedly told us they don’t want this content appearing in their feed.
Other stories (not about the partner program or making money) about how to use TIC as a reader/writer/member are eligible for distribution and for Turnup.
We’re happy for you to write about your experience using TIC—good or bad—and those stories will be distributed to general distribution as well as to anyone who gets the link.
We suggest that you tag these stories “meta-TIC”—in the future we hope to provide a better way to distribute these to readers who are interested in the topic.
Stories in languages other than English
We can only review stories written in English at this time, so unfortunately stories in other languages will not be Turnedup yet—it’s something we hope to do in the future.
The statements, views, and opinions contained in curated stories are those of the authors and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect the opinions of, TIC or its employees.