Christoph Trappe
The byline, and what it does and does not stand behind.
Last reviewed 30 July 2026
The job on this site
The brief is editorial. It comes down to four things: deciding the order in which a buying decision is best explained, pressing each figure until it either produces a traceable origin or gets deleted, marking the difference between what a company will contract to and what it merely advertises, and cutting whatever survives down to something readable in one sitting.
That is a different job from picking a winner, and a different job again from selling one: the money behind the site is declared under advertising disclosure rather than left to be inferred. The comparison carries a platform that leads the table on entry price and a whole section explaining when it is the wrong tool. Both were written by the same person, and the second one is the part worth judging the byline on.
Where the experience applies
Two decades of it are in content measurement — the discipline of asking what a published figure is actually counting and whether the thing it counts is the thing anybody cares about. That question turns out to be the whole difficulty in this category, and the tier system is what came out of applying it here. Bid-request volumes, impression tallies, geo counts and certification badges are published constantly and audited approximately never, and telling them apart from a number that appears on an invoice is the skill the page is built on.
The fuller professional record — the roles, the books, the speaking, the recognition — sits in the author section at the foot of the comparison itself rather than being restated here.
Where it does not
He is not a media buyer and has never managed spend at scale on adult inventory. Nobody should read these pages as the field notes of a practitioner, because they are not.
This is the reason the site is shaped the way it is, and why its stated remit rules whole categories of question out. Not one buy was funded to produce these pages, which is why nothing reports in the first person what a campaign did, and why every conversion figure you meet is arithmetic carrying inputs you can swap out. A writer who had run the campaigns could tell you what happened to them. This one can only tell you what the sources say and how far each source can be trusted — which is a narrower promise, and one that can actually be kept.
The rules the byline works under
- Nothing goes on the page without a dated origin, and origin means the source itself rather than another article quoting it.
- Anything a support desk said stays labelled as something a support desk said, with the month attached.
- Calculated numbers carry the inputs they came from, and the word illustrative travels with them.
- The commercial arrangement does not reach the figures, and the section arguing against the commercial partner is written as hard as any other.
The methodology page sets out how those rules are applied in practice.
Checking any of this
The professional history is externally verifiable and should be verified rather than taken from a page with an interest in it — the profiles linked from the comparison's author section are the place to start. What may be republished from any of it is a separate question, answered under terms of use.
The editorial claims are easier still to test. Open any vendor page cited on the comparison and see whether it says what the table says it says. Where it does not, write to [email protected]. A byline that cannot survive that is not worth putting on anything.