About Us

Adsy Media is an online magazine about the working parts of the technology industry: the code, the contracts, the funding instruments, the compliance regimes and the policy decisions that determine which products get built and which companies last long enough to ship them. Adsy Media publishes it in English from Abbotsford, British Columbia, for a readership that is largely international.

We are independent, and not a wire service or an aggregator. We publish fewer pieces than a large newsroom would, each one written to answer a question somebody building, funding or defending a software company is actually asking — usually one whose honest answer begins with "it depends", followed by the specifics that decide it.

What we cover

Six beats account for nearly everything we publish, each defined less by subject area than by the kind of question it answers.

AI and LLM engineering, and AI policy

What happens to model-based systems after the demo. What does it cost to serve a fine-tuned model at a given request rate, and which part of the bill is tokens, which is idle GPU time, and which is retry logic nobody audited? How do you evaluate a retrieval-augmented system when you have no labelled test set? Which vendor benchmark claims survive a reproduction attempt, and which quietly change the prompt or the scoring rubric? And on the policy side: what a given jurisdiction’s AI rules actually oblige of a company that merely calls somebody else’s model through an API.

Startup fundraising mechanics

The paperwork rather than the press release. How a post-money SAFE converts and what it does to a cap table that already has three of them stacked at different valuation caps. What a pro-rata side letter is worth in practice. How option pools are sized, why the refresh happens at the term sheet stage, and what a 409A-style valuation means for an employee exercising early. What accelerator terms cost in dilution once the safe, the note and the advisory shares are added up. We treat these as arithmetic problems with worked examples, because that is what they are.

Software engineering and infrastructure

Design decisions with consequences attached. When a queue is the wrong abstraction. What a migration off a managed database actually involves, week by week. How teams structure monorepos, build caches and CI so that the median pull request is not a coin flip. Where observability spend goes and how to cut it without going blind on incidents. We favour pieces that show the mechanism over pieces that recommend a tool.

Security, privacy and compliance

The security work that engineering and compliance teams share. How a class of vulnerability is exploited and what mitigations genuinely close it. What SOC 2, ISO 27001, PIPEDA, GDPR or Quebec’s Law 25 require in the concrete: which artefacts, which retention decisions, which vendor contracts. What a breach-notification clock starts on. We report incidents with verifiable substance and skip the vendor advisories.

Growth and unit economics

The numbers that decide whether a business model works. How to compute payback honestly when acquisition costs are blended across channels. What net revenue retention hides when it is quoted without a cohort definition. Why gross margin on an AI product moves with usage rather than with headcount. Pricing changes, packaging changes, and what happened to the companies that made them.

Canadian tech policy and funding programmes

Coverage of the rules and money that shape building a company in Canada: SR&ED claims and what actually qualifies, IRAP and regional development funding, immigration streams that technical hiring depends on, procurement, privacy law reform, and the provincial programmes that vary enough to matter. This beat exists because it is under-served and we can report it from close range.

What we do not cover

Knowing what a publication skips is as useful as knowing what it chases. We do no consumer gadget reviews or handset launches. We publish no stock tips, price targets or investment recommendations, and nothing on this site is financial, legal or tax advice. We do not cover token launches, crypto price speculation or yield schemes. We do not run rumour-stage acquisition stories from a single anonymous tip. We do not reprint funding announcements as stenography; if we write about a round, the terms or the timing tell a reader something they can use. We avoid founder-as-celebrity profiles and generic career advice.

Who reads Adsy Media

Our readers are practitioners: technical founders and operators, software and platform engineers, engineering and security leaders, compliance and privacy leads, finance and growth people, and the investors and programme staff who work with them. They arrive with a specific problem — a term sheet to interpret, an architecture to choose, an audit to survive — and little patience for an article that takes 600 words to reach its point. We write accordingly: the claim up front, the reasoning and sources behind it, the caveats stated rather than buried.

How we report

Our standards are written down in full in our editorial guidelines. In summary: we work from primary sources wherever a primary source exists — the filing, the specification, the changelog, the court document, the programme rulebook, the person who was in the room — and we say so with a link. Where we rely on somebody else’s reporting, we credit and link it rather than absorbing it.

Figures carry their date, their currency and their units, and we name the source of every number we did not compute ourselves. We do not launder vendor marketing claims into fact; a benchmark result is reported with its configuration or not at all. A contested claim needs corroboration before we publish it. Time-sensitive statements are hedged and dated, because a sentence that is true in September may be wrong by December. When we get something wrong, we correct it on the page with a note saying what changed and when; we do not edit errors away silently.

We use software tools, including AI tools, for research support, transcription and draft tidying. Nothing reaches publication on that basis: every claim, quotation, figure and citation is verified by a person, and a human editor signs off on every piece.

How the site is funded, and the wall around editorial

Adsy Media is supported by advertising, by affiliate links in some articles, and occasionally by clearly labelled sponsored content. Our commercial terms are set out in advertise with us and our affiliate practice in our affiliate disclosure.

Advertisers and affiliate partners get no say over editorial coverage, no advance sight of articles that mention them, and no ability to have a piece changed or removed. Sponsored articles are labelled wherever they appear and never dressed to look like our reporting. Affiliate links never determine what we recommend, and an article containing them says so. Being an advertiser buys placement; it does not buy coverage, or protection from it.

Why the Canadian vantage point matters

Publishing from Canada changes what we notice. The regulatory environment we live in — federal privacy law under reform, Quebec’s separate and stricter regime, provincial variation in incentive programmes — makes us habitually ask which jurisdiction a rule applies in. Canadian companies also build for larger markets from day one, which keeps cross-border questions about data residency, payroll and currency exposure in view. The result is coverage international in subject and Canadian in habit: we cover the United States and Europe too, and we say whose rules we mean.

Get in touch

General enquiries reach us at [email protected], story tips and corrections at [email protected], and advertising enquiries at [email protected]. Full routing, a mailing address and response times are on the contact page.

If you work in one of the areas above and want to write about it from experience, read our contributor guidelines before pitching: they explain what we commission and what we decline. You can also see how our newsroom is structured.