Ownership & Funding
This page exists so you never have to guess who pays for Blue Hole Men. A reader who knows where our money comes from can judge our coverage properly, including the parts we get wrong.
Short version: the site is owned by the editors who founded it, funded by advertising, free to read, and answerable to nobody with a stake in the stories we cover. The longer version is below, with the awkward parts left in.
Who owns the site
Blue Hole Men is published by a small private company owned entirely by its founding editors. There is no parent group, no holding company above it, no media conglomerate, no venture investor and no silent shareholder with a board seat. Nobody outside that ownership holds equity or any instrument that would convert into control.
We do not print the registration number or registered office here, because we are a small distributed team and publishing an address invites more nuisance than accountability. It is not a secret. Regulators, researchers, advertisers and anyone with a legal reason to ask can write to support@blueholemen.com and we will send the entity details and the ownership breakdown.
No state money, no party, no PAC
We take no money from any government, state broadcaster, state-linked fund or foreign ministry, directly or through an intermediary. We have no affiliation with a political party anywhere, we are not the project of a think tank or a foundation with a policy programme, and we have never accepted money from a political action committee, a campaign, a candidate or a lobbying firm.
That extends to the editors personally. No owner of this site holds office, campaigns for a party or donates to one while editing our politics coverage. If that changes, the person concerned stops touching political stories and we say so here before anyone has to ask.
Where the money comes from
Advertising is the primary source of revenue and, most months, close to all of it. That covers display inventory sold directly by us and filled programmatically when we have not sold it, single-sponsor slots in the newsletter, and clearly labelled sponsored articles. The rules governing all of it, including the categories we refuse, are on our advertising page.
Two smaller streams exist and we would rather list them than have you discover them. Some Lifestyle, Auto and Gaming pieces carry affiliate links that earn a commission when a reader buys. Those are disclosed in the article, added after the recommendation has been decided, and no affiliate programme has any say in what gets recommended. Occasionally another publication licenses one of our stories, and that fee goes into the same pot. There is no paywall, no membership, no crowdfunding and no donation button today. If we ever add reader support, it gets described here in the same detail.
How ad money is kept away from the copy
In a newsroom this size, the people selling advertising and the people editing stories are sometimes in the same room, so the separation cannot rest on an org chart. It has to be procedural, and it is written down. Commercial conversations do not enter the story queue, nobody on the commercial side sees the running list or a story before publication, and advertisers are never told that coverage of them is coming.
Advertisers get no preview, no veto and no takedown. When one becomes the subject of a story, the story runs and the commercial relationship is disclosed inside the piece. If an advertiser cancels over coverage we log it and carry on, because we would rather lose the account than the archive. The editorial rules this protects are on our editorial standards page.
Grants, donations and anything else offered
We currently take no grants, donations, sponsorships of coverage or foundation funding of any kind. We are not against grant funding in principle. We have not sought it, and the bar for accepting it would be high.
If that changes, here is the commitment in advance. Any grant or donation above a nominal amount gets named on this page: the funder, the amount, the period covered and any conditions attached. We will not take money that arrives with a topic list, an approval right, a review of copy before publication, or a promise not to cover the funder. Funding routed through an intermediary gets traced to its actual source first, and if we cannot trace it we decline it.
Conflicts of interest
The owners of this site hold no other business interests in the industries we cover most heavily. Nobody here sits on a company board, holds a consultancy, advises a public relations firm or owns shares in a company we report on. Where a household holding or a family connection touches a story, the editor concerned declares it and hands the piece over, and the declaration goes in the story if a reader could reasonably want it.
Freelancers answer the same questions before commission, which occasionally costs us the person best placed to write the piece. An undisclosed conflict is the fastest way to stop working with us. Our about page explains how the team is organised and who reads what before publication.
Keeping this page honest
This is the first page we update when the facts change, not the last. A change of ownership, a new revenue stream, a first grant, an investor of any size: each gets written up here as it happens, and the change is noted rather than slipped in.
If something here looks incomplete or contradicts what you can see on the site, tell us at support@blueholemen.com and we will either fix the page or explain why it is right. Readers have caught omissions here before.
Last updated: August 2026
