UK-based B2B publisher The Stack has almost tripled its newsletter audience after buying US tech title Runtime.
The acquisition of Tom Krazit’s Runtime increases The Stack’s reach while allowing founder Ed Targett to focus on the business’s commercial arm and expansion. The deal was funded with cash and shares in the combined business.
Targett, former editor of Tech Monitor (owned by Press Gazette parent Globaldata), and seasoned technology marketer Nishal Ratanji launched The Stack in 2020.
“We spun it up with a grand total of £300 of launch capital from my overdraft,” Targett told Press Gazette. “We hired a guy in Nigeria who I found on Twitter to do us a website for £100, and we basically just started writing – no newsletter, just a really bare bones site, and tried to hope that the quality of what I was trying to write would bring in people.”
The Stack operates as a website and newsletter, covering enterprise technology.
Before the acquisition, The Stack’s free weekly newsletter Command Line, launched in 2023 on Ghost, reached around 12,000 subscribers.
The merging of newsletters will create Runtime by The Stack, adding a further 20,000 subscribers, and it will be sent three times a week.
Runtime targets buyers of complex enterprise technology products such as cloud and cybersecurity services.
Krazit will become editor-in-chief of the The Stack, taking the title’s full-time team of five to six, plus a part-time associate.
Targett said: “Tom has previously run a team of 16, so as we scale we can build a team around him and his industry knowledge, and his newsletter.
“It’s a good-sized newsletter. It’s really well engaged, reaches a lot of people with authority, and we just figured the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
The move will also free up Targett to focus on the commercial side of the business, with 60% of the publisher’s revenue taken up by sponsored content, 30% from events and 10% from subscriptions.
Metered paywall launched in 2025
While The Stack does not share its revenue total, Targett said the company has grown this year and that it has signed “multiple six-figure deals commercially” in 2025 and 2026.
The Stack focuses on sponsored content including newsletter call-to-actions and takeovers, customer case studies and video interviews.
The Stack launched a metered paywall in 2025, with some posts available to read for free, but the majority of content is for members only at £25 a month or £250 a year.
One feature of becoming a member contributes towards The Stack expanding – for every 300 annual subscribers, it commits to hiring a member of staff – though it has not broken that number of paid subscribers yet.
Becoming a member also unlocks exclusive interviews and insights and a 50% discount on all event tickets.
The Stack’s events run as roundtable-style sessions quarterly and a summit twice a year.
Revenue stable despite Google traffic plummet
Traffic to The Stack has declined sharply in recent years, Targett said, following the rollout of Google AI summaries. According to Similarweb, the site received around 45,000 visits in May.
Targett said this “hurt our traffic but didn’t hurt our revenues at all”, and has led to sponsors approaching the company for help improving their visibility in AI summaries.
[Read more: Google faces regulation crackdown in UK over AI use of content]
“We’ve got quite a lot of powerful proof points around GEO and AIO, so that’s actually become like a decent-sized chunk of our commercial proposition as well,” he said.
Commercial partners have never come to The Stack “for big numbers”, Targett said, “It’s more like, ‘here are these ten people who open this article, and those ten people between them hold £20bn in annual technology budget’… so it’s always been like quality over quantity in terms of that audience.”
Early success targeting Linkedin
The Stack has managed to survive extensive cutbacks in the world of technology journalism in 2025, with layoffs across tech news and reviews site CNET, Techcrunch and Informa Target, plus the closure of technology newsbrand Digital Frontier.
Targett pins some of The Stack’s growth to targeting Linkedin “aggressively early on”.
“I think a lot of the trade tech publications in the UK were really not active at all on Linkedin, and a lot of [tech publishers] spread across lots of different social platforms,” he said. “You need to not just do the work but be seen to be doing the work as well.”
The Stack has 16,000 followers on Linkedin, having moved past competitors Computer Weekly (10,000 followers) and ITPro (4,000) “pretty fast”.
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