Outlet profile

heise online

German center-left tech

Owned byHeise Gruppe GmbH & Co. KG, a privately held family company founded by Heinz Heise in 1949 and currently led by Ansgar Heise

FundingMix of digital advertising, reader subscriptions (heise+ paid tier, launched 2019), and affiliated commercial operations including majority ownership of price-comparison sites Geizhals.at and guenstiger.de, plus a 2025 acquisition of hardware retailer Mindfactory

On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The Heise publishing house was founded in Hanover in 1949 by Heinz Heise, initially producing local telephone directories before expanding into technical and computer publishing. Its flagship print title, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, launched in November/December 1983 and became one of Germany's most influential computer magazines. Heise established www.heise.de in 1994, among the first German publishers to go online, and launched its news ticker on April 17, 1996, widely considered the founding moment of heise online as a news portal. The associated political-tech magazine Telepolis launched in March 1996 and won the European Online Journalism Prize for investigative reporting in 2000. The group has remained family-owned throughout its history, passing from founder Heinz Heise to his son Christian and then to the current CEO Ansgar Heise. In 2019, heise online introduced heise+, a paid subscription tier offering exclusive long-form content, diversifying beyond advertising revenue. In 2025, the group acquired the insolvent German hardware retailer Mindfactory, while publicly pledging that editorial operations would remain independent of the new retail division. Today heise online reaches more than 44 million visits per month, making it the most-used IT news site in the German-speaking world; its coverage is editorially independent and tends toward a centrist European liberal perspective on digital rights, privacy, and technology policy.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-06-26; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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