Ownership & Funding
This page says who owns The iBulletin and where every dollar comes from. If anything here stops being true, the page changes before we start spending the money. Last updated: August 2026.
Who owns The iBulletin
The iBulletin is published by a small privately held company owned by its founding editorial team. The people who decide what leads the bulletin are the people who own the company. There is no parent group above us, no holding company, no outside investor, no share class sold to anyone in exchange for influence.
We do not print the registered company name, number or registered office here, because a public page is not where a small team’s home-office details belong. Those details exist, they are current, and we will send them by email to anyone with a legal, regulatory or advertising reason to ask. Who we are as a newsroom, rather than as a filing, is described on our about page.
What does not fund us
No government body, agency or state broadcaster funds this site, directly or through a grant, a sponsorship or a content arrangement. No political party, candidate committee, campaign, PAC or lobbying organisation pays us for anything, and none may buy sponsored content here. No trade association or industry body underwrites a beat.
One honest caveat. Our remaining display inventory is filled programmatically, so a public body or an advocacy group can buy an impression here like any other buyer. That is a bought slot rather than funding, it is labelled as advertising, it earns no coverage, and we do not know in advance who turns up. Political creatives that fail to name their funder are blocked, as set out on our advertising page.
Where the money comes from
Advertising is effectively all of our revenue, and it arrives three ways: display inventory filled by programmatic exchanges, a smaller amount of display sold directly by us, and single-sponsor slots in our email bulletin. Programmatic is the largest of the three and the one we control least, which is why the acceptance rules matter so much.
We take no affiliate income, and there are no affiliate links inside news bulletins. If that changes it will be limited to places where a link genuinely helps a reader, labelled, and disclosed here before it appears. Licensing our copy to another publisher is possible, would be charged for and would be disclosed. There is no reader-support programme today, and no paywall, meter or registration wall, so nothing you read depends on you paying.
How advertising money is kept away from the desk
We will not pretend this is enforced by an org chart. The team is small enough that the people editing bulletins also answer the advertising mail, and separation of that kind is not available to us. What we have instead is a set of procedural rules that are easy to check and easy to catch us breaking.
Advertisers are never told what is scheduled and never see a bulletin before publication. No mechanism exists, in the ad server or anywhere else, for a buyer to have a story suppressed, promoted or moved. Commercial mail is handled outside the writing shift. Any request for editorial influence is refused and recorded internally with the date, and if the buyer presses, the campaign ends. One control matters more than the rest: revenue is not reported to us story by story, so no editor here can see which bulletin earned what, and none of us can be tempted by an answer we do not have.
Grants, donations and anything else offered
We have taken no grants and no donations. If we ever accepted either, we would name the funder on this page, state the amount, the term and every condition attached, and publish that before the money was spent, not in a later annual summary. There is no threshold below which a funder stays anonymous, because a small gift from an interested party is exactly the kind that needs declaring.
We would refuse funding that arrived with editorial conditions, including money earmarked for a beat the funder chose or for coverage of a named organisation. We would also refuse anything requiring us to withhold the funder’s identity. Those are not close calls.
Conflicts of interest
Outside income among the founding team is editing and writing work for other publishers. Where any of it touches a company, a sector or a competition we cover, it is declared internally and the person stays off those stories entirely. Nobody here takes paid speaking work, consulting or advisory roles from companies on our business or technology beats.
Our editors do not trade shares in individual companies they write about and hold no stake in any company covered in the bulletin. Where a connection cannot be avoided, a family interest touching a story worth publishing for instance, it is disclosed in the bulletin itself and a second editor handles the story. Our editorial standards set out how those calls are made, and our corrections policy covers what happens if a conflict surfaces after publication.
Keeping this page current
Ownership changes, a new revenue stream, a first grant, an investor, a sale of any part of the company: each updates this page as it happens, not at the next review. The date at the top moves when the text moves, and material changes get a short note saying what changed.
If something here looks incomplete or looks wrong, tell us at support@theibulletin.com and we will either fix it or explain why it stands. Transparency claims nobody tests are worth very little, so we would rather be asked.
