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Lens & Lead

Money, plainly

Affiliate disclosure

Lens & Lead is funded by affiliate commissions. Here is exactly how that works, and what it does and does not change.

By Mike M. · Updated September 2026

The short version

As an Amazon Associate, Lens & Lead (Iron Mako Media) earns from qualifying purchases. When you click a buy button or a product link on this site and buy something on Amazon, Amazon pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same whether you arrive through our link or not. Those commissions are how the site is paid for.

Every buy button and product link goes through an address on our own domain that begins with /go/, which then sends you to the retailer with our affiliate tag attached. We do it that way for two reasons: it lets us swap the destination if a product moves to a different retailer without rewriting the page, and it lets us count clicks so we know which pages earn their keep. Nothing about the redirect stores anything on your device. Every such link is marked rel="sponsored" for search engines and carries a "#ad" note on the page beside it.

Links to a maker's own spec page, to a standards body or to the American Academy of Ophthalmology are citations, not affiliate links, and we earn nothing from them. The one exception is a citation that happens to live on a retailer we have a program with — an Amazon listing, or the 5.11 Tactical listing we cite for the Oakley SI Ballistic Shocktube. Those go through /go/ and are marked rel="sponsored" like any other earning link, because that is what they are.

Why buttons say “Check price on Amazon”

Prices on our buy buttons come from Amazon's product data and are refreshed daily. A price older than 48 hours is removed rather than shown stale, and every price carries an "as of" date. We never type a price into a page by hand.

What commission does not change

  • Which products appear. A product enters the registry because its maker publishes a rating, not because of what it pays.
  • Where they rank. The rubric is public and protection is weighted first; commission is not a metric.
  • What we say about them. Every card carries a "Skip this if" and a "Where it falls short"; the pick that pays best gets the same treatment as the one that pays least.
  • The rating column. It is quoted from the maker and it links out; there is no way to tilt it.

Other retailers

Two retailers' links earn a commission. Amazon is the first, and it carries almost every buy button on the site. 5.11 Tactical is the second, joined in November 2026 through the Impact network: 5.11 is an authorized Oakley Standard Issue dealer, and Oakley's SI Ballistic line is not sold on Amazon, so a pair we would otherwise have to link without a buy route now has one. Eyewear makers' own stores — Wiley X, ESS, Oakley, Magpul, Revision, Walker's, Radians, Pyramex — are still linked as plain, non-earning references where a spec is cited from them. If we join another retailer's or a maker's affiliate program later, this page will say so and the link will be marked the same way.

Samples and payments

No maker has provided a product, a sample or a payment to Lens & Lead. We do not run sponsored content. If either ever changes for a specific page, that page will say so at the top.

Who is behind this

Lens & Lead is published by Iron Mako Media. The author is Mike M.; the method is on How we rate; the standards every page is written to are on the editorial policy. Questions about any of it: contact@lensandlead.com.