About Milli.az

Milli.az

Milli.az is an Azerbaijani-language news portal based in Baku, launched on 1 February 2010 as the Azerbaijani edition of the Day.az portal family. Where Day.az publishes in Russian, and its sister service Today.az publishes in English, Milli.az is the family's voice in the state language, carrying Azerbaijani-language news, society and entertainment content for the country's domestic majority audience. The name Milli means national in Azerbaijani, a title that states the edition's purpose plainly: the national-language service of one of Azerbaijan's oldest and best-known online news brands.

Milli.az's parent, Day.az, was established in 2003 by Anar Mammadkhanov, a member of Azerbaijan's parliament, trading as the Day.Az Media Company, according to Wikipedia's documented account of the portal. Day.az became one of the leading news websites in Azerbaijan and one of the pioneers of the country's portal era. Milli.az extended that brand to the Azerbaijani-speaking audience at a moment when internet use in the country was expanding fast and the Azerbaijani-language online market was becoming the largest segment of the country's media.

Origins in the Day.az family

The structure of the Day.az family is a small map of Azerbaijan's language market. Day.az itself, launched in 2003, publishes in Russian, long the language of Baku's urban readership and of the wider post-Soviet audience. Today.az carries the family's content in English for international readers. Milli.az, from 1 February 2010, completed the set in Azerbaijani. The three services operate as editions of one media company rather than as unrelated sites, sharing a newsroom tradition and a brand that Azerbaijani readers had known since the early portal years.

The timing of Milli.az's launch was significant. By the end of the 2000s, Azerbaijan's internet audience was growing beyond the Russian-speaking urban core, and Azerbaijani-language content was where the growth in readers, and in advertising, would be. A portal family that existed only in Russian and English was missing the country's largest language community. Milli.az filled that gap, and in doing so followed the path the whole Azerbaijani market would take in the 2010s, toward Azerbaijani as the default language of online news.

The Day.az story: disruption, closure and relaunch

The history Milli.az inherits from its parent is one of the most eventful in Azerbaijani online media. Wikipedia's account, citing contemporary reporting, records that the operators of Day.az claimed to have been victims of cyberattacks during the 2008 South Ossetia war, and that on 11 August 2009 Day.az and ANS Press were disrupted, with Day.az inaccessible for almost two hours. More seriously, on 18 February 2009 the portal became inaccessible, and on the following day the day.az and today.az domains were removed from the .az top-level domain. Reports of the cause ranged from speculation about political mistakes and hackers to the creation of a new website.

The same account records the political background given for the sale process that followed: an interview with the exiled Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky was said to have angered Russian president Vladimir Putin, who demanded the site be shut off. Later, the website was reopened under the management of Trend News Agency, described as loyal to the existing government. Milli.az was launched in February 2010, in the period after that relaunch, as part of the rebuilt Day.az operation under Trend's management. Its existence is therefore tied to one of the clearest early demonstrations that, in Azerbaijan, even a leading commercial portal operated at the tolerance of political authority.

Under Trend News Agency

The connection with Trend, one of Azerbaijan's major private news agencies, founded in 1995 and working in Azerbaijani, English, Russian, Turkish and Persian, has remained visible in the Milli.az operation. Trend publicly marks the anniversaries of the Day.Az portal: its report on the portal's 18th anniversary, in September 2021, described Day.Az as one of the leading news websites in Azerbaijan, technologically updated and developed into a multifunctional portal with services including its own mail service, the DayTube video hosting platform, a jobs service, a weather platform for all regions of Azerbaijan, a flight schedule service for Heydar Aliyev International Airport and an exchange-rate service covering the country's banks. The anniversary report recorded a Facebook following above 200,000 and more than 650,000 subscribers to DayTube.

Personnel links are also documented. When Trend News Agency staff received the state jubilee medal for the 150th Anniversary of Azerbaijani National Press in 2025, the published list of recipients included, alongside Trend's own leadership, Maryana Ahmadova as editor-in-chief of the Day.az news portal and Asif Damirov as editor-in-chief of the Milli.az news portal. That listing confirms both the continuing Trend connection and the named editorial leadership of Milli.az in 2025, details that are documented for few Azerbaijani portals of any size.

Language and audience

Milli.az publishes in Azerbaijani for the domestic audience, and its content mix, news, society and entertainment alongside the Russian edition's output, matches that remit. In the taxonomy of the Azerbaijani market it belongs with the Azerbaijani-language general portals, but with a distinction few of them share: it is the language edition of a brand that predates most of the market. Readers who knew Day.az in Russian encountered the same stable in Azerbaijani on Milli.az, and the portal appears in international listings of Azerbaijani news sites in its own right; the Prism UA disinformation-resilience study of Azerbaijan listed Milli.az among the country's Russian-tracked news sites surveyed, a sign that the portal is monitored as part of the core national media set.

The audience context is the mass Azerbaijani online public. Media Landscapes recorded about 7.9 million internet users in Azerbaijan by June 2019, around 80 percent of the population, and describes online portals and social networks as the country's main source of news, having displaced print. An Azerbaijani-language portal attached to a major agency group addresses that public with the full daily agenda: state and politics, economy and energy, incidents and society, sport and show business.

News coverage and content

Milli.az's documented remit is Azerbaijani-language news, society and entertainment content published alongside Day.az's Russian edition. In practice that means the portal carries the shared Day.az and Trend news flow in Azerbaijani: presidential and government activity, parliament, foreign policy and the Karabakh settlement, economic and energy news, social issues, crime and emergencies, football and other sport, and the entertainment and lifestyle material that drives a large share of portal traffic in Azerbaijan. As the Azerbaijani edition, it is also the family's natural home for content of specifically national cultural interest, in the language in which Azerbaijan's cultural life is primarily conducted.

The society and entertainment weight in Milli.az's profile is characteristic of Azerbaijani-language portals, whose mass audiences reward human-interest, celebrity and lifestyle coverage alongside hard news. It distinguishes the edition's flavour from the more wire-like English service and aligns it with domestic competitors such as Oxu.az and Qafqazinfo in the competition for the Azerbaijani-speaking reader's daily attention.

Place in Azerbaijan's media system

Milli.az sits inside the mainstream, pro-government segment of Azerbaijani media, by structure as much as by output: it is an edition of a portal that was reopened under the management of a government-loyal agency after a politically driven shutdown, and it remains within that agency's orbit. International monitors describe Azerbaijan's media environment as one in which large domestic portals are broadly aligned with the authorities, while independent outlets face blocking, prosecution and exile; the arrests from November 2023 onward of journalists at Abzas Media, Toplum TV and Meydan TV concern that independent sector. No such measures against Milli.az or Day.az are recorded. The family's own history in 2009 shows the other side of the mainstream bargain: survival and relaunch in exchange for operating within politically acceptable management.

Under Azerbaijan's Law on Media, in force since February 2022, and the Media Development Agency established by presidential decree of 12 January 2021, which maintains the Media Registry and state support mechanisms, Milli.az works within the standard regulatory framework for Azerbaijani portals. Its staff's inclusion in the 2025 state jubilee medals for the national press underlines its recognised place in the official media landscape.

Relationship with Day.az and Today.az

For the directory reader, the three names are best understood as one operation in three languages. Day.az, founded in 2003, is the flagship and the Russian-language service. Today.az is the English-language service, which has itself received national recognition, including the UGUR national business award in 2012 for informing the world community about developments in Azerbaijan. Milli.az, from 2010, is the Azerbaijani-language service. Material flows between the editions, and the brand equity is shared: when Azerbaijani reference sources discuss Day.az, Milli.az is part of the story, and vice versa. Treating Milli.az as a wholly separate outlet would misrepresent it; treating it as merely a translation would undersell it, since it has its own editor-in-chief and its own audience in the country's largest language.

Milli.az today

Milli.az today is the Azerbaijani-language face of the Day.az family: a Baku-based portal publishing news, society and entertainment content in the state language, under Trend News Agency's management, with Asif Damirov documented as its editor-in-chief in 2025. Born in 2010 out of one of Azerbaijani online media's most turbulent episodes, the 2009 shutdown and relaunch of Day.az, it represents the moment Azerbaijan's pioneering Russian-language portal era gave way to the Azerbaijani-language mass market that now dominates the country's news consumption.