I came across an interesting post on a rather poorly-formatted blog known as TechRights.org about the precarious nature of The Register’s finances.
The Register is a snarky tech news site – “Biting the Hand that Feeds IT” is its tagline – that regularly skewers IT news with its sarcastic take on developments. In recent years, it seems to depend more and more on Hacker News for its tips. I find that a few days after something interesting appears on HN, there will be a news article on El Reg (as they often refer to themselves) with the same story, often with views that approximate a summary of HN’s comments. The Register’s own comment section is a bit of an echo chamber: Microsoft bad, Linux good, USA bad, AI bad, privacy grumble grumble, etc.
Still, it’s on my daily reading list, if only for the often amusing headlines.
But for how much longer?
According to financial records, the owners’ financial situation is pretty bleak. They’ve cut staff in half, have £6 million in debt, and are facing deteriorating income.
To be fair, their auditors used the “going concern” boilerplate, which means that they’re expected to be able to cover their costs in the near future. This language shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement of the company’s financial status, because things have to be very dire before it’s removed.
The post I linked gets into all sorts of other accusations in various other linked posts, not all of which I agree with and which you can read for yourself. But the financial statements don’t lie.
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
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