ISU News reaches readers who come to us deliberately rather than accidentally. They arrive looking for an explanation of a specific subject and they stay to read it. That produces an audience with unusually high attention and a demonstrated interest in understanding how systems work, which is a valuable thing to place a message in front of.
Our audience
Our readership skews toward professionals, graduate students, policy and finance practitioners, technologists, clinicians, and educated general readers. Traffic is concentrated in the United States, with substantial readership across Canada, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, India, and Australia. Sessions are long by industry standards because our articles are long and readers finish them.
Our strongest sections by engagement are Business, Technology, and Politics, with Science and Health producing the highest completion rates. Detailed, current audience figures are available on request to prospective advertisers.
What we offer
Display advertising. Standard formats placed in the article body, sidebar, and between content blocks. We limit the number of units per page deliberately, because a page saturated with advertising devalues every unit on it.
Section sponsorship. A single advertiser can sponsor a section for a defined period, receiving prominent, clearly labelled placement on that section’s index and article pages. Sponsorship carries no editorial influence over what appears in the section.
Newsletter placement. Sponsored positions in our email editions, labelled as advertising and separated from editorial content.
Clearly labelled sponsored content. We will publish advertiser-supplied material where it is visually distinct from editorial, permanently labelled as paid content, excluded from editorial indexes, and attributed to the advertiser rather than to our newsroom. We will not write it in our editorial voice or present it as journalism.
The editorial firewall
This matters more to us than any individual campaign, so we state it directly.
Advertisers have no influence over what we cover, how we cover it, or when we publish. Buying advertising does not purchase favourable coverage, protection from unfavourable coverage, advance notice of an article, or the ability to review copy before publication. We will report accurately on an advertiser’s industry, and on the advertiser, exactly as we would if no commercial relationship existed.
We do not remove or amend accurate published work in response to advertiser pressure, and we will end a commercial relationship rather than compromise a story. If a piece touches on an organisation with which we have a commercial arrangement, that arrangement is disclosed in the article. Our broader standards are set out in our editorial guidelines.
What we do not accept
We decline advertising for products and services that we consider incompatible with a publication built on evidence. That includes unproven medical treatments and supplements making therapeutic claims, cryptocurrency speculation and trading schemes, payday and high-interest consumer lending, gambling promotions targeted at problem gamblers, adult content, weapons, and any advertisement designed to be mistaken for editorial content or for a system notification.
We also decline advertising that uses deceptive creative, autoplay audio, interstitials that block the article, layouts that shift as the reader scrolls, or trackers we cannot account for in our privacy policy. These formats damage the reading experience we have built, and no rate makes that worthwhile.
Technical requirements
We require assets that meet reasonable file-size limits so pages load quickly on mobile connections, creative that does not rely on Flash or deprecated technology, and full disclosure of any third-party measurement or tracking code included with the campaign. Advertisers are responsible for ensuring their creative complies with applicable advertising law and platform policy in the territories where it runs.
How to get started
Write to advertising@isunews.com with a short description of your organisation, the campaign objective, the sections or audience you are most interested in reaching, your intended flight dates, and your budget range. We will respond with availability, current rates, and audience data.
We work with a limited number of advertisers at any one time in order to keep page density low, so early enquiry for a specific period is worthwhile.
Reader feedback on advertising
If you encounter an advertisement on this site that is deceptive, disruptive, inappropriate, or appears to violate the standards set out above, please tell us at advertising@isunews.com and describe where you saw it. We investigate every report and remove creative that does not meet our conditions.