About The Post Millennial

The Post Millennial

The Post Millennial is a Canadian conservative online news magazine publishing Canadian and American news from Montreal, Quebec. Founded in August 2017, it has grown from a small startup into one of the most-read conservative news sites in Canada, reaching an average of nearly two million unique monthly visitors in early 2021. Owned since November 2025 by JTN Network, the parent company of the American outlet Just the News, the site combines news coverage with a substantial opinion section and has been described by critics, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters for America, as far-right.

Overview

The Post Millennial publishes national and regional news with a focus on politics and culture, aimed at a conservative audience on both sides of the Canada–United States border. Its opinion section forms a significant portion of its content, featuring conservative commentators — columnist Barbara Kay has been among its opinion writers — while its news operation has drawn scrutiny over its practices: a 2019 CBC report found that much of its news content was reused from other media outlets without additional reporting. Harvard University's project on the future of media categorizes the site as "an alternative news and opinion website." Co-founder Ali Taghva once described the original concept, in a 2020 interview, as a media outlet delivering unedited stories that would "speak for themselves."

History

The Post Millennial was founded in August 2017 by three young Montrealers: Matthew Azrieli, Ali Taghva, and Madison Hofmeester. Azrieli is the grandson of David Azrieli, the billionaire Canadian-Israeli real estate developer and philanthropist. Taghva, an Iran-born blockchain developer, had first tasted political organizing as a high school student, using social media to coordinate a student protest against the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation over the Putting Students First Act while attending Richmond Green Secondary School in 2012. Hofmeester worked as a search-engine-optimization consultant — a fitting background for a digital news startup.

The trio's ambitions extended beyond a single site. In 2018 they founded a second, short-lived conservative news website, The Nectarine, with Jeff Ballingall, who was then a political campaigner for Ontario Premier Doug Ford through his advertising group Ontario Proud. According to Taghva, the two websites shared "back-end resources," an early sign of the close ties between the new conservative media ecosystem and partisan political operations.

Growth was rapid. The site's Facebook presence expanded dramatically between June 2018 and May 2019, with page interactions growing from 36,000 to 194,000 per month. By January 2019, the website was receiving up to 200,000 monthly visits, according to Similarweb data. A Montreal office anchored the operation, and the organization planned an expansion into Toronto in 2020. In May 2019, Jeff Ballingall was hired as the company's chief marketing officer — a significant appointment, as Ballingall was credited by Taghva with leading the successful Conservative Party of Canada leadership campaign of Erin O'Toole in August 2020. A media study by Canada's National Observer found that 8 per cent of Conservative respondents read The Post Millennial, indicating real penetration of the party's base.

In mid-2020, Taghva left his position as editor-in-chief to build a cybersecurity company, a departure that marked the end of the founding era. By early 2022, the site's audience had reached substantial scale: it was ranked 23rd among Canadian media outlets by audience size, with an average of 1,968,000 unique monthly visits between January and March 2021, according to Similarweb — though it did not meet Comscore's minimum reporting standard, a reminder of the methodological debates around digital audience measurement.

Ownership and Funding

The website was initially owned by the Montreal-based Post Millennial Corporation, and it was criticized for a lack of transparency about its ties to Conservative Party politicians — a sensitive subject given Ballingall's dual role in conservative campaigning and the site's management. In mid-2019, when announcing Ballingall's hiring as an executive, the company said it was funded by "private investors." Taghva said the site drew revenue from consulting clients and through paid subscriptions or advertisements, though it did not reveal subscriber numbers and displayed no ads. After securing a buyer for The Post Millennial in 2022 and announcing his own departure, Azrieli stated that he had self-funded the website.

In May 2022, the Human Events Media Group announced that it had acquired The Post Millennial. The announcement came from Memphis, Tennessee, on May 4, 2022, and the deal was spearheaded by Tennessee entrepreneur and financier Jeff Webb, founder of Varsity Spirit, who had bought and revived Human Events in 2019 as an online news and opinion outlet. The group also owns Human Events, the American conservative publication founded in 1944 that went online-only in 2013 — placing the young Canadian site under the same roof as one of the oldest names in American conservative media. Then, in November 2025, JTN Network, the parent company of the American outlet Just the News, announced that it had acquired both The Post Millennial and Human Events. The company said it planned to expand The Post Millennial by shifting its focus toward a younger demographic, signalling a new chapter for the publication under American ownership.

Content and Controversies

The Post Millennial's content mix blends news aggregation with original opinion writing. Its news coverage spans national politics, regional stories, and cultural issues, while its opinion pages host conservative voices. The reliance on repackaging other outlets' reporting, documented by the CBC in 2019, has been a persistent criticism: the site's news operation has often functioned more as a curator and reframer of others' journalism than as a producer of original reporting.

The site has also been the source of significant misinformation controversies. In July 2020, after Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster was fatally shot in Austin, Texas, The Post Millennial falsely claimed that Foster had fired shots at a civilian vehicle. In fact, Foster had not fired any shots before he was killed. The outlet later issued a correction but continued to blame Foster for the death — an episode the Daily Dot described as an example of how disinformation circulated by fringe groups supports preferred narratives. The incident illustrated the risks of the site's high-velocity publishing model, in which being first with a politically congenial narrative sometimes outran verification. As of 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters for America both described the website as far-right.

Coverage and Audience

The Post Millennial covers both Canadian and American news, reflecting its ownership history and its audience's interests on both sides of the border. Its readership is conservative and heavily engaged on social media, where the site's Facebook growth in 2018–2019 first demonstrated its ability to reach large audiences. With nearly two million monthly unique visitors at its 2021 peak, it ranked among the most-visited Canadian news sites, punching far above the weight of its small newsroom. The planned shift toward a younger demographic under JTN Network ownership suggests the site's future audience strategy will lean further into the social-media-native formats that drove its initial rise.

Digital Presence

The Post Millennial is a digital-only publication, with thepostmillennial.com as its sole publishing platform. The site hosts its news articles, opinion columns, and multimedia content, and its growth has been driven overwhelmingly by social media distribution — particularly Facebook, where its page interactions grew more than fivefold in less than a year during 2018–2019. The outlet has no print edition and no broadcast arm; its entire business is the website and the social channels that feed it.