Every year, somewhere between the CMS updates and the paywall experiments, a small research project tries to answer a question that rarely gets asked out loud: what tools are news publishers actually using to do their work?
The answer lives mostly behind closed doors. Technology decisions at publishing organizations tend to stay internal hard to benchmark, difficult to share, and rarely compared across teams or regions. That invisibility is what gave the Tech Stack Study its reason to exist.
Five Years of Mapping Publisher Infrastructure
The project began in 2021, launched on the initiative of Marion Wyss, an online-media professional and specialist in subscriber-acquisition strategies who also serves as Audiencers' Publisher. From the start, the idea was straightforward: collect responses directly from the professionals who work with these tools every day chief technology officers, newsroom managers, product managers, marketing managers, and ad sales directors and build an anonymized, aggregated overview of what is actually in use.
By 2022, Sciences Po had joined the effort, a partnership that brought institutional structure to what had been a volunteer undertaking. The school, long known for its journalism program, became the administrative home for the study, helping to ensure its continuation as an annual update. The arrangement also added credibility to the project's independence: responses are strictly confidential, with access limited to Wyss and the administrative team at Sciences Po's journalism school. No vendor, platform, or external organization can see individual answers.
In 2026, the study reached its fifth edition, and with it came a notable expansion. The project, which originally focused on the French publishing landscape, extended beyond France for the first time. A fourth category was also introduced, dedicated specifically to advertising technologies a signal that the monetization side of publisher infrastructure had grown complex enough to warrant its own questionnaire.
What 118 Publishers Revealed About Their Tools
The 2026 survey was organized around four separate questionnaires: marketing tools, editorial tools, advertising tools, and technical tools. Each was completed by the managers of the relevant teams, and each solution cited was analyzed through a twofold approach: its market share among respondents, and an assessment of its quality or performance rating. The result is a picture that goes beyond a simple tool inventory to capture how publishers actually feel about what they are using.
The numbers behind the study are substantial. The 2026 edition collected 118 contributions from publishers, describing nearly 5.5 billion monthly page views a significant slice of digital news consumption. Four tool families structure the findings: the marketing stack that drives audience growth and subscription journeys; the editorial infrastructure that supports newsroom production; the advertising technology that handles monetization; and the technical layer covering data infrastructure and platform decisions.
The very word "stack" carries meaning here. As the study's own framing suggests, it captures the iterative nature of how these tools accumulate driven by the evolution of technologies and the transformation of how readers consume news. A stack is not a blueprint. It is a record of decisions made under pressure, with partial information, often with urgency.
The Fragmentation Problem Beneath the Surface
That urgency is worth dwelling on. Most publisher tech stacks do not begin as systems. They begin as survival tactics. A publisher launches a digital offering, closes a few early deals, and proves there is demand. Revenue shows up, and with it comes pressure to move faster. New tools get added. Another vendor gets layered in. Reporting gets stitched together across platforms. What emerges is not a designed infrastructure, but a patchwork that holds just long enough to keep things moving.
That model works early on. It has to. But at some point, growth exposes what that system actually is not scalable infrastructure, but a collection of temporary fixes stacked on top of each other.
The fragmentation shows up in how teams work. Editorial wants speed. The product team wants flexibility. Revenue wants performance. Each team has its own sub-platform, and each platform has its own data and its own version of the truth. The result is a stack where systems compete instead of collaborating.
Programmatic demand can mask this problem for a time the scale of the broader digital ecosystem allows inefficiencies to hide. But for specific publishing formats, particularly video and connected television, the supply is more limited, the inventory more valuable, and the tolerance for inefficiency much lower. Publishers who built stacks optimized for display often find those same stacks working against them when they try to sell premium video or CTV inventory.
Where Budget and Technology Meet
Research from FT Strategies' technology foundation analysis has helped to quantitatively evidence a pattern long suspected in publishing circles: leading publishers those within the top 20% segment with regard to profitability allocate a meaningfully larger share of their budget to product and technology infrastructure. The difference is not marginal. According to the organization's findings, these top performers direct 24% of their budget toward Product and Technology, compared to 18% for other publishers.
This aligns with what Der Spiegel's Managing Editor of Strategy and Operations, Philipp Lowe, described in a recent interview with FT Strategies: a continuous underinvestment in technology relative to editorial is what prevented digital revenue growth at many organizations. The gap between the industry's stated commitment to digital transformation and its actual spending on the infrastructure to support it has been a persistent tension.
What the Tech Stack Study adds to this picture is specificity. more than arguing abstractly about whether publishers should invest more in technology, it documents what that technology actually looks like across the industry which tools are in use, which categories of infrastructure are well-served by vendors, and where publishers are building custom solutions or relying on in-house development.
Four Tool Families, Four Operational Realities
The study's structure around four tool families reflects how publishers themselves organize their technology decisions. Marketing tools handle subscriber acquisition, onboarding, retention, and the subscription experience. Editorial tools cover content management, workflow, and the production pipeline. Advertising tools manage monetization, ad serving, and programmatic demand. Technical tools address data infrastructure, platform hosting, and the underlying architecture that everything else runs on.
Within each family, the landscape is uneven. Some categories have robust vendor ecosystems with well-established market leaders. Others rely heavily on custom, in-house-built solutions because no commercial product yet serves the need well. The study does not prescribe what publishers should use its role is descriptive, not advisory. But the pattern of what is common alongside what is custom gives publishers a rare benchmark: a way to ask whether their technology choices reflect widespread practice or represent an outlier approach.
For a MyArticlePosts reader evaluating how a publisher's infrastructure is organized, this kind of benchmark has practical value. It shifts the question from "what tools should we use?" to "how do our choices compare to what the field is actually doing?" That is a more answerable question, and one that leads to more productive conversations with technology vendors, internal teams, and strategic advisors.
Why Confidentiality Shapes What Gets Shared
The Tech Stack Study's insistence on strict anonymity is not incidental. Publishing organizations are notoriously reluctant to discuss their technology stacks openly competitive concerns, vendor relationship sensitivities, and simple organizational inertia all play a role. The study's credibility rests on the premise that no individual publisher's responses will ever be disclosed.
Access to raw responses is limited to Wyss and the Sciences Po administrative team. Survey responses are used solely to produce the annual report. No data is resold, shared, or reused for commercial purposes, and the project does not build any external database of publisher stacks beyond the consolidated yearly publication. Technology vendors mentioned in the study have no access to results that are not already public.
This independence is a significant part of why the project has endured. Five editions in, the study remains volunteer-led and non-commercial. It is not funded by any company, vendor, or third party. Its sole purpose is to contribute to shared knowledge about the publishing technology landscape and the structure protects that purpose from being compromised by commercial interests.
What This Means for MyArticlePosts Readers
For readers researching how publishers build and maintain their technology infrastructure, the Tech Stack Study offers something rare: an industry-level view built from direct practitioner input more than vendor surveys or analyst estimates. The 118 contributions in the 2026 edition describe nearly 5.5 billion monthly page views across a range of publisher sizes and types. The findings are aggregated and anonymized, but specific enough to be useful as a reference point.
If you are evaluating a publisher's technology approach whether as a potential partner, a vendor, a reader, or a researcher the study provides a baseline for comparison. It does not tell you what the right answer is, but it tells you what the field looks like. That context is valuable for anyone trying to understand whether a publisher's infrastructure reflects intentional design or accumulated reaction.
The study also documents the gap between what publishers want from their technology and what they currently have. Understanding that gap is useful for anyone working in digital publishing, media strategy, or technology consulting it shapes what questions to ask, what benchmarks to use, and where to look for improvement opportunities.
Building Coherence from the Inside Out
The pattern that emerges from five years of this study is consistent: most publisher tech stacks are assembled over time, not designed from the start. One tool for a specific need. Another added when a gap became urgent. Reporting stitched together across platforms when someone finally had time to connect the dots. What looks like a stack is often a record of past decisions, each reasonable in isolation, collectively forming an infrastructure that is harder to maintain than it should be.
Large platforms operate differently. Centralized infrastructure, where inventory is packaged, structured, and easy to buy, creates a simpler experience for advertisers and a more defensible position for publishers. The contrast with independent publishers who often have inventory spread across systems, inconsistently packaged, and difficult to represent as a single offering illustrates why technology coherence matters for competitive positioning.
The path forward is not necessarily more tools. The research suggests it is about replacing fragmentation with infrastructure turning disconnected workflows into a coordinated system that can support growth without requiring constant improvisation. That reframe, from accumulation to architecture, is what separates publishers who are managing their technology from those who are merely reacting to it.
The Tech Stack Study does not tell publishers how to make that transition. But by documenting what the field is actually doing, it makes the comparison possible. And comparison, in a fragmented industry, is its own form of progress.
Where to Read Further
The full findings from the 2026 Tech Stack Study, including breakdowns by tool family and methodology documentation, are available for download at the Tech Stack Study's official site. The site includes the study's methodology, FAQ, and information about how the data is collected and protected.
For additional context on publisher technology investment patterns, FT Strategies' analysis of purpose-built technology stacks covers how leading publishers allocate resources to product and technology, and why that allocation correlates with profitability. The piece includes findings from the News Sustainability Project, which involved over 450 publishers.
For a broader view of how publisher infrastructure scales from early-stage operations through enterprise-level deployment, CTVBuyer's examination of scaling publisher tech stacks describes the competitive dynamics between independent publishers and centralized CTV platforms, and the technology choices that shape that difference.