The advertising business runs on relationships nobody writes down. Money moves, favors get traded, and a lot of the trade press plays along because the people it covers are the same people who fund it. ADOTAT was built to be the exception to that, not another act in the show.
So here, in plain language, is how this publication actually works. No mission-statement fog. Just the mechanics.
ADOTAT makes money the boring, honest way: reader subscriptions, sponsorships, and events. The newsletter is free because the reporting is meant to be read, not gated behind a paywall the industry can expense and ignore. Paid ADOTAT+ subscriptions, sponsors, and events cover the cost of doing the work.
Sponsors and advertisers pay to reach our audience. They do not pay to shape what we say about them, and they never see a story before it publishes. There is a wall between the people who sell ADOTAT and the people who write it, and it is not decorative. Sponsored content, where it runs, is labeled as sponsored content every time, without the cute euphemisms the rest of the industry loves.
If a company sponsors ADOTAT and then does something worth criticizing, we criticize it. That is the entire point of the wall. And when a story covers a company that also funds ADOTAT, we say so inside that story.
We are going to get things wrong sometimes. Everyone who does this at speed does. The difference is what happens next.
When we make a factual error, we fix it and we say so. Corrections are noted at the bottom of the piece with a timestamp, so you can see exactly what changed and when. We do not quietly scrub a mistake and pretend it never happened. Silent edits are how outlets launder their errors, and we would rather own ours in daylight.
The small stuff, typos, broken links, a misspelled name, gets fixed without ceremony. Anything that changes the meaning, the facts, or the fairness of a story gets an explicit correction or update note attached to it.
Think we got something wrong? Write to pesach@adotat.com. Bring the receipts and we will move fast.
Correction, [date]: An earlier version of this piece misstated [what]. It has been corrected. The original incorrectly said [the wrong thing].
This is an industry where the reporter, the source, the investor, and the consultant are sometimes the same four people at the same dinner. Pretending otherwise insults everyone at the table.
So we disclose. If ADOTAT, or anyone writing for it, has a stake in what we are covering, an investment, an advisory role, a consulting relationship, a paid speaking slot, a personal tie, you will find it stated plainly inside the piece.
The rule is simple: if a reasonable reader would want to know about a relationship before deciding how much to trust a story, we tell them. We would rather over-disclose and let you weigh it than stay quiet and let you find out later, because finding out later is how trust dies.
Trust is not a tagline. It is a track record. This page is the standard we are asking you to hold us to. If we ever fall short of it, that is a story too, and you are welcome to hold us accountable in public.
Questions about any of this go to pesach@adotat.com.
Pesach Lattin · ADOTAT