About Digiday

Digiday

Digiday is an online trade publication covering digital media, marketing, and advertising, headquartered in New York City with offices in London and Tokyo. Founded in April 2008 by Nick Friese, Digiday provides daily news about the business of online media — publishing, advertising, agencies, and platforms — while also producing industry summits, awards galas, and podcasts. As the flagship brand of Digiday Media, a vertical media company whose portfolio also includes Glossy (fashion and beauty), Modern Retail (retail), and WorkLife (the modern workplace), Digiday has become the essential trade press for the digital media industry: the publication media professionals read to understand their own business. Fortune once wrote that unless you spend all your time reading about the media industry's marketing side, you might not have heard of Digiday — "in which case you probably read it all the time."

Founding: A Conference in a Recession

Founder Nick Friese created Digiday in April 2008 — what he later called starting a media company when "only a fool would," amid the second-worst economy since the Great Depression, a severe credit crunch, and a challenging personal divorce. With support from Doug Carlson, managing director of the digital publishing company Zinio, Friese organized a Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference in a New York City hotel in June 2008, bringing together 300 publishers and tech providers at a time when nobody was hosting publisher-focused events. After the conference, the company had about $3,000 left in the bank — but the idea was proven. Friese teamed with former colleague Karen Arieli, and the company, originally called DM2 Events (Digital Media and Marketing Events), was renamed "Digiday" — Arieli's shorter version of Friese's proposed "Digital-Day," brainstormed over email while she lived in Jerusalem.

Coverage: The Business of Digital Media

Digiday provides daily online news about advertising, publishing, and media — covering the platforms, publishers, agencies, brands, and technologies that make up the digital media economy. Its reporting tracks ad-tech developments, publishing business models, the platform-publisher relationship, retail media, and the workforce issues reshaping the industry. The publication's tone is insider-savvy and candid: its running "Confessions" series, featuring anonymous frank talk from digital marketing insiders, was described by Bloomberg View as "a good source of frank and cynical, though anonymous, descriptions of a deeply dysfunctional business." For media professionals, Digiday is both news source and mirror — reporting on the industry's transformations with an edge.

Events and Awards: Convening the Industry

Beyond publishing, Digiday produces events — industry summits and awards galas — that convene the digital media business. These events, rooted in the company's origins as DM2 Events, bring together publishers, agencies, brands, and technology providers for networking and deal-making. The Digiday Media Awards honor the companies, technologies, and campaigns that stand out in media each year. The company says about half its revenue comes from advertising, branded content, sponsored content, and career listings, with the other half from events and awards programs — a diversified model that delivered what the company calls "double-digit revenue growth" in the mid-to-late 2010s.

Digiday Media: The Vertical Portfolio

Digiday is the flagship of Digiday Media, a vertical media company founded in 2008 by Nick Friese with a mission to chart how industries move from analog to digital. The portfolio has expanded well beyond media and marketing: Glossy (launched 2016) covers fashion and beauty; Modern Retail covers retail; WorkLife covers the modern workplace and workforces. Each brand applies Digiday's playbook — trade journalism plus events plus awards — to its vertical. The company's approach, in its own words, is "to continually reimagine and reshape the media we cover and create, guided by our core values of quality, honesty, curiosity and tenacity." The vertical strategy has made Digiday Media a case study in building a sustainable B2B media business.

Leadership Transition: Amrani as CEO

In January 2024, Digiday Media named David Amrani as CEO, succeeding founder Nick Friese in day-to-day leadership. Amrani, who had been with the company for a decade and had overseen the launch of its three additional editorial brands, took on a mandate to drive growth across all business divisions and expand audience engagement. Friese remained intimately involved as founder and chairman, focusing on partnerships, acquisitions, investments, and extensions of the core brands. The transition marked a new phase for the company: professionalizing management while preserving the independent spirit — and the commitment to "authentic, high-quality journalism" — that had defined Digiday since its founding.

Podcasts and Multimedia

Digiday produces a podcast series covering client, agency, and media perspectives — extending its trade journalism into audio. The podcasts feature interviews with industry leaders, analysis of media trends, and the candid insider talk that characterizes the brand. Combined with video, newsletters, and the flagship website, Digiday's multimedia operation serves media professionals across formats. The company's willingness to experiment with format reflects its founding insight: that covering modern media requires modern media.

The Digiday Awards

The Digiday Media Awards honor the companies, technologies, and campaigns that stand out in media each year — judged by industry panels and covered as news in their own right. Categories span the industry's preoccupations: best commerce partnerships, publishing innovation, and marketing excellence. The awards galas, alongside the company's industry summits, make Digiday a convener as well as a chronicler: the publication doesn't just report on the digital media business, it gathers it in rooms. This dual role — journalist and event host — is central to the trade-press model Digiday perfected.

Digiday+ Membership

Digiday has built a membership tier, Digiday+, offering deeper access to its journalism — with student memberships at $99 a year and discounted rates for qualifying nonprofits. The membership model reflects the broader industry shift toward reader revenue: even trade publications, long dependent on advertising and events, are cultivating direct relationships with readers. For media professionals, Digiday+ promises the inside intelligence that justifies the subscription — the confessions, the data, and the analysis that the free site only hints at.

Why Digiday Matters

In an industry that reinvents itself quarterly, Digiday provides the continuity of informed trade journalism: the publication media professionals read to understand their own business. From its 2008 founding as a recession-era conference to its current status as a global vertical media company, Digiday has chronicled the digital transformation of media while embodying it. Its candid voice — the anonymous confessions, the skeptical analysis — gives the industry a mirror it can't look away from. For anyone who works in media, marketing, or advertising, Digiday isn't optional reading; it's the trade press that tells the truth about the trade.

The Confessions Effect

Digiday's "Confessions" series — anonymous interviews in which media and marketing professionals speak without attribution — became one of trade journalism's most imitated formats. The series' power lies in its premise: that the industry's real truths are the ones people will only tell anonymously. Combined with the site's skeptical analytical voice — the one that prompted a Fortune writer to call it "the most promising" of its generation — the Confessions made Digiday the industry's confessional booth. In a business built on spin, a publication that prints what people really think is revolutionary.

Digiday Today

Today, Digiday continues to publish daily at digiday.com — covering the business of digital media for the professionals who work in it, producing summits and awards, and anchoring Digiday Media's portfolio of vertical brands. From a $3,000-bank-balance conference in 2008 to a global media company with offices on three continents, Digiday has chronicled the digital media industry's transformation while embodying it. Its official website is https://digiday.com.