How these guides are researched

Primary sources, cited inline

Every substantive claim links to the material it rests on, numbered in the text and listed in full at the end of each guide. Those sources are regulator guidance (the FTC, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service), the statutes themselves (for example Fla. Stat. § 849.094 and N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 369-e), court opinions, platform policies published by the platforms, and law-firm practitioner analyses where a synthesis is genuinely useful. Across the 6 guides there are 27 distinct sources, all linked.

Where a guide states a threshold — a prize value that triggers a filing, say — it cites the statute rather than a secondary summary of it.

What we do not do

• No invented statistics. There are no conversion rates, no engagement lifts, no "brands see X%" claims anywhere in these guides. If a number appears, it is from a cited source and is usually a statutory threshold.
• No fifty-state survey. The guides cover a handful of states where the rule is clearest and most commonly hit. They say so, and they do not imply the remaining states are silent.
• No claim that any promotion is lawful. Not yours, and not one run on Contest.Zone. The product is an example of one structure, not a compliance guarantee.
• No AI-generated citations. Every link resolves to the document it claims to be.

Who writes them, and who has not

These guides are written and maintained by the Contest.Zone team, which builds a skill-contest product and therefore has an obvious interest in the subject. We have tried to handle that by citing sources you can check rather than asking you to take our word for it, and by being specific about the cases where a skill structure does not help.

They have not been reviewed by counsel. That is a real limitation and we would rather say it than let the citation density imply otherwise. Attorney review is planned before paid pilots; when it happens, this page will say who performed it and when.

Corrections and dates

Each guide shows its publication date, and an updated date when the content has changed since. Promotion law and platform policy both move; a guide's date is the honest signal of how current it is. If you find something wrong — a superseded statute, a dead link, a policy that changed — tell us and we will fix the guide and move its updated date.