The tech industry is booming but life is tough for specialist publishers covering the sector.
In recent months both Techcrunch and Business Insider have made deep cuts to their technology industry reporting teams.
Mashable and CNET owner Ziff Davis, in the US, made redundancies at the end of 2024 and again in March 2025. And Techcrunch made an earlier round of layoffs in January (said to be less than ten people).
Computer Weekly editor Bryan Glick said it has been a “very tough market” since the pandemic which saw marketing budgets cut.
“Those publications who are more dependent on advertising have been the ones that have suffered the most,” he said. “Those that have been through a transformation and come out with a new business model, arguably have been able to survive that correction in tech marketing spend better than others have.”
Glick said that when he started at Computer Weekly in 2009 it was “an ailing print publication and a website that was 90% dependent on regular advertising, on display advertising” and this led to a need to change the business model.
What worked for Computer Weekly is a combination of lead generation and intent marketing, which means visitors to the website get a first article for free, and after that they will be asked to register with some basic business demographic details.
After that, and within the bounds of GDPR and data protection, “what we do effectively is identify the subjects and the topics that our audience is reading about, and package that up in a way to sell that as marketing insights and market information to tech companies”.
“So that means an editorial focus on depth and context, unique content and investigations,” he said. “It’s a great business model editorially, because it supports high quality journalism.”
Having launched in 1966, Computer Weekly is tech journalism’s great survivor and ran a print edition until 2011. Last year the title won a British Journalism Award for its 15-year investigation into the Post Office IT scandal.
Credit crunch ended boom times
The boom era for established IT industry titles ended with the financial crisis in 2008.
Alan Burkitt-Gray, a retired tech and telecoms journalist, said: “At its height in the early 1980s, Computing [another long-established B2B brand] published 96-page issues, roughly tabloid size, with the jobs ads starting around page 32. The first 32-33 pages being about 25% display advertising, and everything after page 32 or 33 being classified job ads. So it’s been going down for 40 years.”
Mark Kember is an account director at marketing and PR firm OneBite. He said that often, cuts are linked to areas that can’t directly prove they influence revenue or lead to spending by customers. “Where it is hard to prove ROI, companies have cut back and reduced their spending.
“B2B tech is not a homogenous market – some publications that are linked to hot market areas like data centres or AI have increased their pull, giving them the cash to acquire in other markets and bolster their businesses.”
One publisher that Kember cited is The Stack, which launched in 2020 and concentrated on reaching specific audiences: “They have doubled down on the collaboration with vendors on content, and they have been able to expand based on that success.”
How The Stack is bucking trend
Founder of The Stack, Ed Targett, believes that the vast majority of tech publications are still heavily traffic-dependent, and said “making the pivot to demonstrating audience quality over audience quantity is a major adjustment both for them and their partners”.
Targett said The Stack is monetised through a mix of sponsored content and private events, and the former “is powerful because we’re good at it: technology vendor brand marketing is largely absolute drivel that turns people off”.
It has also recently launched a paywall, charging £250 a year and promising to hire a new reporter once it has reached 300 paid subscribers.
Asked how he competes in a still crowded market for tech news and events, Targett said: “This is where trust comes in: people see we do something differently and they tend to come back for it.
“I do think there’s event fatigue out there though. Too many tech events stacked with vendors only and salespeople selling to each other. That’s why smaller, more intimate, community – based events are important.”
Targett said there is a need to demonstrate an engaged audience on the “buy side” to commercial partners.
“It makes more sense to have ten CIOs wielding a combined $20bn in IT budget reading your material than 10 million random readers, for example, and we’ve succeeded thus far based on that principle,” he said.
“Credibility is king. You can’t churn stuff for clicks. That’s never been our play and others are learning the hard way that this world is disappearing.”
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