Jon Rankin
Jon Rankin

A beer and brewing magazine turned us down in twenty-six minutes. That is the fastest no I have ever received, and I have collected a lot of them. It was polite, it was clear, and it was final: they do not publish content related to tobacco products across any of their sites. I thanked them and closed the file. Twenty-six minutes is not a rejection you can argue with. It is a policy that existed long before I sent the email.

I run content and partnerships for Black Note, a manufacturer of naturally extracted tobacco e-liquid in Irvine, California. We make a nicotine product for adults twenty-one and over. That single fact is the reason I am writing this, because it produced an unusual marketing situation that I think is worth putting in front of the people who read this publication.

Never available, not restricted

Most brands describe their paid channels as constrained. Budget is tight, CPMs are up, attribution is murky. Ours are not constrained. They do not exist.

Google does not accept advertising for our category. Meta and TikTok prohibit it outright in published policy. Those policies do not distinguish between buying media and paying a creator, so influencer marketing is closed to us as well. Black Note launched in January 2015. There has never been a quarter since then when we could have chosen to switch on paid acquisition and did not.

That makes our data unusually clean, and I say that as someone who would rather have the option. There is no paid brand spend inflating our branded search. No retargeting quietly catching the visitors organic missed. No paid floor holding revenue steady through an algorithm update. One site, eleven years, one channel.

Rankings went up. Clicks went down.

Here is the part I did not expect, taken from our own Search Console rather than from a study. I am going to describe the shape of it rather than print our traffic figures. Those are commercially sensitive, and the shape is the part that transfers to anyone else's account anyway.

Over the two years to August 2026, our average position in search improved by about four places. Across those same two years, our clicks fell by roughly two thirds.

Read that again, because the direction of travel is not what a marketing report usually looks like. Impressions fell as well, by a little over a third, so this is not purely a story about our rankings holding while demand dried up. But impressions fell nowhere near as far as clicks did. Click through rate fell by close to half at the same time as our rankings were getting better.

Our worst month for click through rate was February 2026, and in that same month our average position was the best it had been in two years. We have recovered some ground since, but none of that recovery came from ranking higher, because we were already ranking higher.

The low point for clicks was June 2026 at 16,187. The low point for click through rate was February 2026 at 1.39 percent, and in that month our average position was 8.96, the best it had been in two years. We have recovered some ground since, to 22,050 clicks in August, but nothing in that recovery came from ranking higher, because we were already ranking higher.

I am not going to tell you the single cause, because I do not know it with certainty and neither does anyone selling you a diagnosis. What I can tell you is what the shape of it rules out. It is not a penalty. It is not a technical collapse. It is not us losing rankings to better funded competitors, because the rankings improved. Something changed between the impression and the click, and for a brand with no paid channel there is no second lever to pull while you work out what.

If you advise clients who treat position as the metric and clicks as a consequence, this is the case study for why that stopped being true.

What the outreach actually looks like

When paid is closed, earned and disclosed paid placement is the whole program. Since the middle of August we have approached roughly 270 publishers. I have kept a record of every one, and the pattern is more useful than the total.

The category is the first question, always, and it is usually the only question. A barbecue title came back with a blanket no on nicotine. A fragrance publication and a perfumery trade title both declined the same day. A military title declined on category within hours of a form submission. None of these were close calls, and none of them were about the pitch. When a publisher has a category policy, your writing quality is not the variable.

So we changed how the emails open. Every one now leads with the disqualifier in the first line and offers a one line no. It reads like this: we make a nicotine product for adults, plenty of publishers decline the category, and if that is a no here then one line back is all I need and I will not follow up. That change did not raise our acceptance rate as far as I can measure. It did something more useful, which is that it shortened the dead conversations from three weeks to one reply, and it stopped us spending effort on outlets that were never going to say yes.

Two other findings that cost us real time. A published advertising address on one outlet's own contact page did not exist, and the email bounced. A second outlet's advertising address turned out to be a restricted distribution group that rejects mail from outside its own organization, which returned a delivery failure ninety-six seconds after we sent it. Both bounces landed on the message thread rather than in the inbox, so both sat in our tracker as awaiting reply for days. If you run outreach at any volume, check your threads for bounces before you record anything as pending.

And the least comfortable number: roughly forty of those approaches were web forms we filled in and submitted, and not one produced a reply of any kind. Not a decline, not an acknowledgement. That is a meaningful share of the program's effort producing nothing measurable. My working conclusion is that a form is where an inbound enquiry goes to be forgotten unless a named human is expecting it, though I hold that loosely because I cannot see what happened on the other side.

What the market charges

I am not going to name publishers against prices, because those numbers were given to me in confidence and I would like to keep buying. The ranges are worth knowing.

For a single sponsored article, quotes we have received this year run from three hundred dollars to twelve thousand five hundred. Two premium consumer titles start their sponsored features in four figures and one starts around seven thousand five hundred. Regional and trade publications cluster far lower. We have closed placements at three hundred, four hundred, five hundred and seven hundred and fifty dollars.

What we have found no correlation with is domain authority. We measured the individual placement pages, not the domains, and sponsored articles almost universally accrue nothing of their own. Page level authority sat at or near zero on every sponsored page we tested, including on domains with authority scores in the eighties. A sponsored placement is close to the same product everywhere. The price differences reflect the publisher's brand and audience, which is a real thing to buy, but they do not reflect a difference in what the page itself becomes.

The thing nobody tells you about paid links

We started this program assuming a paid placement would carry a followed link. That assumption was wrong, and finding out cost us money.

Our largest single placement went live correctly, on time, well written, indexed, and with the link marked as sponsored. Which is to say the publisher did exactly what Google's own documentation tells publishers to do. Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links states that links marked sponsored, nofollow or ugc "will generally not be followed," and it instructs publishers to mark paid placements as sponsored. We had asked twice about link treatment and had not received a direct answer, and we paid anyway. That was our error, not theirs.

Since then we have asked the question in writing before every commitment, and the answers have been instructive. One large publishing group confirmed that paid links are marked nofollow and sponsored across their entire portfolio. Another escalated our question to their production team and their director before confirming, twice, that they could not provide a followed link without a policy violation. A third offers followed links, but only on a separate subdomain that we measured at nineteen organic visits a month, against sixty six thousand on the main site.

The uncomfortable corollary, which I have not resolved: the publishers who do give us followed links on paid articles are the ones not following Google's guidance. That is not a mark of a better partner. It carries its own risk, and buying it knowingly is a different decision from buying disclosed media. If you are advising a client to buy sponsored content for search benefit, that is the conversation to have before the invoice, not after.

What I would do differently

Three things.

I would ask about link treatment and indexing in the first email, not the third. We now do, and it disqualifies targets before we spend anything on them.

I would treat a publisher's advertising page as a claim rather than a fact. Several outlets advertise products they no longer sell, sell products their pages do not mention, or route to addresses that no longer work. On one rate card the product we wanted was hidden inside a tabbed panel that a plain reading of the page missed entirely, and we nearly concluded it had been discontinued.

And I would stop treating a category refusal as a failure of persuasion. It is not. When a publisher has a policy, the honest move is to accept it in one line and move on, which is also the move most likely to leave the door open if their policy ever changes.

The part that is actually reassuring

None of this is a triumph story and I would not want it written as one. Our clicks are down two thirds from their peak while our rankings are the best they have been. We have spent money on a placement that passed no ranking signal. We have filled in forty forms that nobody read.

But eleven years in, with no paid channel available at any point, Black Note is still here, still ranking for thousands of keywords, and still selling naturally extracted tobacco to adult smokers who want real cured leaf rather than a flavor assembled in a lab. Earned media is slower than the alternative, and for us it is not an alternative, it is the only thing there is. If your client thinks organic is a nice supplement to paid, it is worth knowing what it looks like when it has to carry the whole thing.

I am happy to answer questions from anyone working on a restricted category. Some of what we learned the expensive way is transferable, and there is no reason for two of us to pay for it.

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Jon Rankin runs content and partnerships at Black Note, which manufactures naturally extracted tobacco e-liquid in Irvine, California, for adults twenty-one and over.

WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.