Advertise With Us
The iBulletin sells advertising because that is what pays for the newsroom. This page covers what is available, what we refuse, and where the line sits between the news desk and the advertising mailbox. Last updated: August 2026.
Who reads us
We are not going to print a readership number on a public page. Any figure here would be unverifiable by you and flattering to us, which is the wrong combination. A buyer who asks gets current numbers from our analytics provider and ad server, for the period they care about, with definitions attached.
We can describe the shape of it. General news readers, weighted towards the United States with a tail across the other English-speaking markets, arriving from search on breaking stories and from habit otherwise. Most are on a phone. The verticals carrying the site are business (rate decisions, earnings, jobs data, filings), technology (products, chips, platform rules and outages), sport (results, injuries, transfers) and the breaking-news file over all of it. Sessions are short by design, because the bulletins are short.
What you can buy
Display placements run in the bulletin stream and on story pages, sold directly or filled by the programmatic exchanges that take our remaining inventory. Our email bulletin carries one sponsor per send, placed above or below the bulletins and labelled, never woven into the copy. Sponsored articles are covered below.
The format limits are not negotiable, because speed is the product you are buying. Nothing that plays sound without being asked. No full-page interstitial in front of a story. No unit that shifts the page after the text has rendered. No creative imitating our bulletin typography or labels: our whole design is a short block of plain text, so anything dressed to look like one is a fake bulletin.
Sponsored content, and how it is labelled
Sponsored articles carry the word Sponsored above the headline and in every list where they appear, in a treatment distinct enough that nobody skimming a phone mistakes one for a bulletin. The advertiser is named as the source. Nobody in the newsroom writes or edits paid copy, and paid items stay out of our news feeds and sitemaps.
We will decline sponsored copy that states a contested claim as established fact, attacks a named competitor, or reads like a news bulletin about the advertiser’s own announcement. Rewriting is fine and we will suggest it. If the point of the buy is that readers should not notice it is a buy, we are the wrong site, and our editorial standards say why.
What we refuse
Some categories never run, whatever the rate, and that is practical rather than moral. An audience that stops trusting the page stops being worth buying, and a scam beside a story about scams is the fastest way to lose them.
We turn down:
- Investment offers promising guaranteed returns, crypto multiplication schemes, binary options
- Health products making disease claims, miracle cures, unlicensed pharmacy
- Debt relief, credit repair and payday-style lending with the real cost buried in the terms
- Political advocacy that does not clearly name who paid for it
- Sportsbook creatives written as tips, and any betting placement inside our sport bulletins
- Creatives built to imitate our editorial format, a browser warning or a device notification
The firewall, and how partners are handled
Buying advertising gets you inventory and nothing else. No advertiser sees what is scheduled, gets a look before publication, or has a route to a takedown afterwards. Being an advertiser earns no coverage, and being covered earns no discount. Where a company running a campaign becomes the subject of a bulletin, we publish and tell them nothing in advance. They can pause the campaign when they see it. That cost is accepted.
One rule is worth spelling out. We do not take advertiser keyword blocklists as a condition of a direct buy, because a list of words a buyer would rather not appear beside is a soft form of editing, and recall, lawsuit and recession are the job. Programmatic buyers apply exclusions at their end and we cannot stop that. No headline here is rewritten to keep the inventory around it saleable. The governance behind that sits on our ownership and funding page.
Direct buys are trafficked by us and every creative is reviewed before it runs. Programmatic demand arrives through exchanges, where we set category blocks, review creatives after the fact and pull anything a reader reports. Partners must comply with the privacy law applying to the reader and honour the consent signal we pass. What gets set in a browser is itemised in our cookie policy, and reader data generally sits in our privacy policy.
Booking, reporting and response times
Write to support@theibulletin.com with ADVERTISING at the front of the subject line. Include the format, market, dates, budget range and whether creative exists. We have no glossy media kit. What comes back is a rate card, current ad-server figures, and an honest note on whether the slot is free. Reply within two working days.
Live campaigns get ad-server reporting: impressions, viewable impressions, clicks and click-through rate, plus send and open figures for newsletter sponsorships, monthly or at the end of the flight. We do not guarantee engagement rates, we do not sell adjacency to a chosen topic, and we will not hand you a story’s traffic and call it a campaign result.
