Platform Terms

Plain English, and binding. A law firm did not write this page; the founder did, in plain English, so you can actually read it. That does not make it any less real: these are the operative terms of the Platform, and using the Platform means you agree to them. We will have counsel review these terms as the company grows, and any material change comes with at least 30 days notice, the same as our Terms of Use promise.

The short version: your blog is yours. Your posts are yours, your subscribers are yours, and you can export both and leave whenever you want. We get a license to host and promote your work, nothing more. You must be honest, especially about money. A few kinds of content are banned outright. If you graduate to your own domain, we keep your redirects working for as long as this Service operates. The longer version follows, and we wrote it to be read.

1. What This Addendum Covers

These Platform Terms apply to members of the Empower Network Blogging System, the service that gives you a blog hosted on empowernetwork.com, email tools for your subscriber list, and optional AI writing assistance (together, “the Platform”). They supplement our Terms of Use, which continue to apply. If this addendum and the Terms of Use conflict on a Platform matter, this addendum controls. Related policies are part of the deal too: the Income Disclaimer, the Copyright Policy, the Data Processing Addendum, the Content Reports page, and the AI Writing Disclosure.

What is live today, and what is rolling out. We are launching in stages. Your blog, your lead-capture form and subscriber list, and one-click export are live now. Email sending to your list, the AI writing assistant, and the Graduation service are still being built and are not yet available. Where these terms describe one of those features, that part takes effect for you when we switch the feature on and tell you. We spell it out here so you know the deal before you rely on it, not to claim it exists today.

2. You Own Your Content

Plain English: everything you write belongs to you, before, during, and after your membership. You own the content you create and publish on your blog. Publishing here transfers nothing to us. When you leave, your content leaves with you.

So that we can actually run the Platform, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to do these specific things with your published content:

1. Host, store, reproduce, and display it on the Platform.

2. Excerpt it, with attribution and a link to the original, in places like the network directory and the weekly digest.

3. Distribute it by email, to your subscribers when you send it, and in network emails such as the digest when your post is featured.

4. Feature and promote it, on our pages, in our emails, and in our marketing, always with attribution to you.

5. Use short excerpts of it as example input (“few-shot” prompts) to the AI writing assistant that serves Platform members, so the assistant can learn the style and structure of good posts from the network.

That is the whole list. We do not sell your content, we do not license it to third parties for their own use, and we do not use it to train foundation AI models. The license for a piece of content ends when you delete it, except for copies already delivered to others (emails sent, excerpts in already-published digests) and copies held briefly in routine backups.

3. AI-Assisted Drafts

Plain English: what the AI helps you write is yours to use, but the law may not protect raw machine output, so edit it and make it your own. We claim no ownership of drafts produced by the Platform’s AI writing assistant at your request. As between you and us, they are yours. Be aware that under current United States law, content generated by AI without meaningful human authorship may not qualify for copyright protection at all. Editing a draft into your own words and adding your own experience is both the honest way to publish and the way to have enforceable rights in the result. The AI Writing Disclosure explains the feature fully, including the rule that the assistant will not draft earnings claims.

4. Who Can Join, and Who the Platform Is For

You must be at least 18 years old to have a Platform membership. Blogs may not publish content directed at children under 13, and the Platform’s email tools may not be used to collect information from children. This is a hard rule with no exceptions, because our tools are built for adult business and personal publishing and are not designed to meet child-privacy law.

5. Income and Earnings Claims

Plain English: you can write about money, but every claim must be true, provable, and paired with what typical results look like. This company’s history makes us stricter about this than most platforms, on purpose. If you publish a claim about earnings, income, or financial results, yours or anyone else’s, all of the following apply:

1. You must be able to substantiate it. Written proof, in hand, before you publish, not after someone asks.

2. You must disclose typical results alongside it. If you do not have reliable typical-results data, you must say clearly that most people who attempt the same thing earn little or nothing.

3. Content containing earnings claims is never featured. It will not appear in the network digest, the directory’s featured row, or any promotional surface we run, regardless of substantiation. This is not a judgment of your honesty; it is a bright line that keeps the whole network safe.

4. The AI assistant will decline to draft earnings claims, and automated checks may queue income-claim content for review.

Violations of this section are treated as serious. We may unpublish the specific content, remove the blog from search indexing, or terminate repeat offenders. Our Income Disclaimer applies across the Platform.

6. Banned Content and Banned Uses

Plain English: this is a network of real people writing real things. Operations built to game search engines are not welcome. The following are banned from the Platform:

1. Affiliate publishing operations in these verticals: coupon and promo-code sites, casino and gambling promotion, pharmaceutical and supplement affiliate sales, and payday-loan or similar high-cost lending promotion.

2. Scraped, copied, or spun content, and content published primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than to be read.

3. Link schemes between blogs on the Platform, including shuffling content between blogs to concentrate ranking signals.

4. Anything illegal, deceptive, infringing, or hateful, per the Terms of Use, and anything directed at children per section 4.

We may refuse, unpublish, de-index, or remove content in these categories, and terminate accounts built around them, at our discretion. Ordinary affiliate links in genuine editorial content are fine; they must carry the disclosure the law requires, and where the Platform adds an automatic “sponsored” tag and disclosure block, that does not replace your own duty to disclose.

7. One Person, One Voice

Plain English: memberships are for individual writers, not for agencies stockpiling blogs. Each membership is for one person operating their own blog. Bulk registration, agency registration on behalf of clients, and operating networks of blogs under one or multiple accounts are banned. We may require identity confirmation where registration patterns suggest bulk activity, and we may terminate accounts created in violation of this section.

8. Your Right to Export and to Graduate

Plain English: leaving is a feature we built, not a loophole you have to find, and this section makes it a contract right.

1. Export. At any time, you may export your full blog content in a standard machine-readable format and your subscriber list as a standard file. Export is self-serve from your dashboard, free, and available whether you are staying, cancelling, or already cancelled. We will not delay or degrade an export to keep you here. You can run an export yourself at any time, as many times as you like, so a current copy is always one click away.

2. Graduation. The Graduation service (one-time fee, priced at purchase) moves your blog to your own domain: full content migration, permanent 301 redirects from your Platform URLs to your new domain, your complete redirect map delivered to you as data, DNS setup help, and subscriber list transfer.

9. The Redirect Promise

Plain English: after you graduate, your old links keep pointing to your new home, free, for as long as this Service runs, and we will not hold that hostage. After Graduation, we install and maintain 301 redirects from your former Platform URLs to your domain at no ongoing charge. No subscription, membership, or fee is ever required to keep your redirects working. This commitment lasts for as long as the Service operates. If we ever shut the Service down, we commit to a wind-down period of at least 12 months during which your redirects keep working, with notice to you at the start of it. (Our Terms of Use give paying users at least 60 days notice before any shutdown; this redirect commitment runs longer, and on top of that.) We also give you your complete redirect map as data at Graduation, so you can verify our work and carry the mapping anywhere.

10. Cancellation and What Happens to Your Blog

Plain English: when you cancel, nothing is deleted for 90 days, your blog stays readable but leaves search for 12 months, and you get your export either way. When your membership ends, for any reason:

1. Days 1 to 90 (grace period): your blog and data remain intact. You can export everything yourself, reactivate, or (once Graduation is available) move to your own domain. If your access has been suspended, ask support and we will produce your export for you.

2. Months 4 to 12 (archive): your blog remains readable at its address but is marked so search engines remove it from their indexes. You can still export or reactivate.

3. After 12 months: we may permanently delete the blog and its data. Subscriber personal data is handled on the shorter schedule in the Data Processing Addendum: deleted at the end of the 90-day grace period unless you exported it or reactivated.

11. Publication, Search Indexing, and Moderation

Plain English: you can publish immediately; appearing in search engines is a milestone that follows a short review. New blogs start out hidden from search engines. After your first three posts, at least seven days, and a review (48-hour turnaround once you qualify), your blog opens to search. This protects every member’s blog from the spam that would otherwise get the whole network penalized. We may remove content or return a blog to non-indexed status where content violates these terms, and we may freeze content pending review when it is flagged. If we take action against your content, we tell you what we did and why, per the Content Reports page.

12. Copyright and Repeat Infringement

The Copyright Policy governs infringement notices and counter-notices. Here is the part that belongs in your contract: we terminate the memberships of repeat infringers. Multiple valid infringement notices against your content, not resolved in your favor, will end your membership under that policy.

13. Email: You Are the Sender

Plain English: emails to your list go out in your name, under your legal responsibility, and the law requires your real postal address on every one.

1. You are the sender of record for every email sent to your subscriber list through the Platform. You are responsible for its content and its compliance with the law, including the CAN-SPAM Act.

2. Every email you send must include a valid physical postal address for you. You must provide one before you can send. A post office box or a commercial mail-receiving address registered to you satisfies this. If you do not want to publish your home address, get one of those first.

3. Your list is opt-in only. Subscribers sign up themselves through your blog, and once email sending goes live they confirm by double opt-in before you can email them. Purchased, rented, scraped, or imported-without-consent lists are banned. Every email carries a working one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribes are honored immediately.

4. Your subscribers are yours, not ours. We will not email your list for our own purposes. The Data Processing Addendum defines how we handle their data on your behalf.

14. Fair Use of Email Sending

Plain English: sends are unlimited for real newsletters to real subscribers. The limit is abuse, not volume. Your plan includes unlimited email sends to your list, up to your plan’s subscriber cap. “Fair use” means the sending patterns of a genuine publisher. We may throttle, pause, or suspend sending, after notice where practical, when sending threatens the deliverability of the whole network: sustained high spam-complaint rates, high bounce rates suggesting a stale or unconsented list, sudden anomalous volume, or content that violates these terms. Sending limits protect every member’s ability to reach the inbox; they are never used as a pricing lever.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Platform Terms. Material changes get at least 30 days notice by email before they take effect, consistent with the Terms of Use. Your acceptance of these terms, with version and timestamp, is recorded when you join and again when material changes take effect.

Last updated: July 2026.