A short note on how we keep our journalism free — and what we will (and will not) do with your details.
In short
- No subscription fee. No paywall. You read the articles for free.
- We ask for your business email when you register.
- We will never sell it. We will never pass it on to a third party without your explicit consent.
- We will not use it for anything beyond signing you in unless you tell us we can.
- You can change your preferences, or withdraw your consent, at any time.
- One free account works across every Disrupts Media publication.
The value exchange
Disrupts Media publishes four titles: The Biotech Times, The Fintech Times, The Datatech Times and Disrupts. Original, high-quality journalism is not cheap to produce. We pay editors, reporters and contributors to research, write and produce the articles you read, and we are committed to continuing to do so.
We have chosen not to charge our readers a subscription. We believe the analysis and reporting our titles produce should be accessible to anyone working in our sectors, regardless of their employer’s training budget.
Instead, our work is funded by commercial partnerships — sponsorships, events and sector-specific advertising. Those partnerships only work if we can demonstrate that our readership is genuinely the audience our partners want to reach: senior professionals working in biotech, fintech, datatech and the wider disruptive-tech ecosystem.
That is why we ask for your business email. It is a low-friction way for us to confirm you are a working professional, and it lets us describe our readership to our sponsors with confidence. In return, you continue to read independent journalism for free, and we continue to be able to pay the people who produce it. We see this as a fair exchange, and we are committed to keeping it fair.
Why business, not personal
We accept work email addresses only. Personal webmail accounts — Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, iCloud, ProtonMail and similar — cannot be used to register.
This is not intended to inconvenience you. It is the only way we can show our sponsors that our audience is genuinely a professional one. If your organisation does not issue email addresses, please contact us at the address at the end of this note and we will help you find a way to register.
What we will do with your email
- Use it to sign you in to our publications.
- Use it, in aggregate and never in a way that identifies you individually, to describe our readership to our sponsors — for example, the proportion of readers working in particular sectors, role types or company sizes.
- Send you things you have specifically asked for: editorial newsletters from any of our four publications (if you opt in), and/or marketing emails from our sponsors and partners (if you opt in separately).
- Contact you about your account itself — for example, security notices, important service changes, or material updates to this note or to our Privacy Policy.
What we will never do
- We will never sell your email address or any other personal data to any third party. Ever.
- We will never share your individual data with sponsors. Sponsorship reporting is always anonymised and aggregated.
- We will never opt you in to newsletters or marketing without your explicit, freely-given consent.
- We will never use design tricks to make withdrawing consent harder than giving it.
- We will never use your email to profile you for any purpose unrelated to the services described in this note.
Your consent choices
When you register, we ask you to make two separate choices, in addition to creating your account:
- Editorial newsletters — would you like to receive editorial briefings from The Biotech Times, The Fintech Times, The Datatech Times and/or Disrupts? You can opt in to any combination, or to none of them.
- Marketing emails — would you like to hear from our sponsors and partners about events, products and offers relevant to your sector? Yes or no.
Both choices are optional. Declining either or both does not affect your ability to read articles across our publications.
Changing your mind
You can update your consent choices at any time from your preferences page. From there you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from any of the editorial newsletters, opt in to or out of marketing emails, request a copy of the personal data we hold about you, or close your account entirely. You can also unsubscribe from any individual email we send by clicking the unsubscribe link in its footer.
One account, four publications
A single Disrupts Media account works across all four of our publications. Sign in once and you can read across the entire group without registering again. Your preferences are managed centrally, so you can, for example, subscribe to The Biotech Times newsletter without committing to anything from the other three titles.
Your rights under data protection law
Disrupts Media Ltd is the data controller for the personal data you provide when you register. Under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to access your data, have inaccurate data corrected, have your data deleted, restrict how we process it, object to processing on legitimate-interests grounds, receive a copy in a portable format, withdraw any consent you have given, and complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). Our full Privacy Policy sets out how each of these rights works, including our lawful bases for processing and our retention periods.
Why this matters to us
Having a detailed, honest picture of who reads us is what allows us to show our sponsors that we reach the audience their investment is intended for. Those commercial agreements are what allow us to continue to publish editorial content with integrity and transparency, free at the point of reading. Your registration is the small but essential link that makes the whole model work — and we will treat it with the seriousness that deserves.
Contact us
Questions about how we use your data, or about this note, can be sent to privacy@disruptsmedia.com.