About Digiato

Digiato

Digiato is a Persian-language online technology news outlet based in Tehran, Iran, and published at digiato.com. Founded by Mani Ghasemi, it published its first posts in May 2014, at a moment when Iranian technology journalism was still dominated by print publications, and it was deliberately built the other way round: online first, social-media first, and written for the young, connected readership that was forming around smartphones and Iran's fast-growing startup scene. The bet worked quickly. By Digiato's own account it passed 2.5 million visits in a single month within four months of launch, and in an interview with the newspaper Donya-e Eqtesad its founder put its first-year traffic at more than 35 million visits. In the decade since, Digiato has become one of Iran's best-known digital technology media businesses — a newsroom whose reporting on startups, internet policy and the digital economy is cited by the Financial Tribune, by Freedom House and by international Iran-watchers, and the parent of the gaming site Vigiato.

Digiato's significance lies in the model it proved. Where established Iranian technology coverage lived in weekly print magazines, Digiato showed that a small, independent, Persian-language website could build a mass audience purely online, sustain a fast daily news cycle, and turn its readers into an active commenting community. Its history — from a founder who began as a teenage-style blogger and gadget reviewer, through explosive early growth, to a mature outlet running interview programmes and documenting Iran's internet outages day by day — tracks the maturation of Iran's own digital media generation.

Founding in 2014

Digiato began operating in the Iranian year 1393, corresponding to 2014. The site itself has recorded the exact starting point: in a message to readers published in September 2014, the Digiato team recalled that "on 23 Ordibehesht 93" — 13 May 2014 — "we wrote Digiato's first posts," adding that they had not imagined the success that followed. The founding year matters because of what Iranian technology media looked like at the time. As founder Mani Ghasemi later explained in his Donya-e Eqtesad interview, technology journalism in Iran was still mostly a print business; Digiato was conceived from the start as an online and social-media-first outlet, publishing where its audience already was rather than asking that audience to buy a magazine.

The founder-led, independent structure was also distinctive. Digiato was not launched by a newspaper group, an electronics importer or a state institution; it was the project of a young technology writer who had spent years in Iran's blogging and print-tech world and decided the future was a website. That origin gave the outlet its informal, community-minded voice, which its early reader messages leaned on heavily — Digiato addressed its audience as a kind of virtual family gathered around the site.

Mani Ghasemi and the road to Digiato

Mani Ghasemi's path to founding Digiato runs through the first era of Persian blogging. In an interview published by Vigiato, the gaming site that later spun out of Digiato, Ghasemi described how his first blogging experience was on Yahoo 360, the long-closed social blogging service, and how he simply enjoyed producing content and sharing what he knew with others. That hobby became a profession when Arash Barahmand, then editor of the weekly technology magazine Asr-e Ertebat Plus, liked his blog writing and brought him onto the magazine's team, where Ghasemi reviewed gadgets and wrote about applications.

The print years gave him both craft and contacts. It was at Asr-e Ertebat Plus that he met the colleague who wrote the magazine's games page — identified in the interview as Mohsen — and when Ghasemi later decided to launch Digiato, that colleague was among the first people he approached and asked to join the new venture, because, as he put it, he knew Mohsen was the best at what he did. The story explains two lasting features of Digiato: its roots in hands-on gadget reviewing, and the strength of its games coverage, which eventually grew large enough to become a separate publication.

A strikingly fast first year

Digiato's early growth was exceptional even by the standards of Iran's booming internet. Four months after its first posts, the site marked a milestone with a gift giveaway for readers: it had crossed 2.5 million visits in the preceding month. In those first four months the team had published more than 1,900 posts and received some 44,000 reader comments — figures the site itself published in September 2014. The comment volume is as telling as the traffic: from the beginning, Digiato's model produced discussion, not just page views, and the editors credited their readers' constant presence and criticism for the site's improvement.

The trajectory continued across the first full year. In his Donya-e Eqtesad interview, Ghasemi said Digiato reached more than 35 million visits in its first year of operation. For a Persian-language technology site with no print edition, no broadcaster behind it and a small founding team, that scale established Digiato almost immediately as one of the reference points of Iranian online media — and demonstrated, to advertisers and to other publishers, the commercial reality of online-first technology journalism in Iran.

What Digiato publishes

Digiato's output centres on technology news in Persian: developments in global technology, the Iranian technology and startup scene — a dedicated thread of its coverage is labelled "Iran technology" — and practical coverage of software and applications, including guides to apps and services for Persian-speaking users. Its published work ranges from launch coverage and explainers to long interviews and data-led features, such as its reporting on Iranian programmers' emigration intentions built on the 2024 survey by the Iranian developer platform Quera, in which more than 5,120 programmers took part.

The editorial centre of gravity is the intersection of technology and Iranian society. Digiato writes about global products, but its most distinctive journalism concerns what technology does inside Iran: how startups raise money and hire, how developers work with clients in London, Berlin or Toronto from Iranian cities, how app stores and platforms behave under Iranian rules, and how internet restrictions reshape business and daily life. That is the coverage other outlets quote, and it is what separates Digiato from a simple Persian translation of international tech news.

Gaming coverage and the birth of Vigiato

Games were part of Digiato from the start, a direct inheritance from the founder's print years, where his closest collaborator had run the games page. Digiato built a substantial Persian-language games-review operation: the review aggregator OpenCritic lists 207 game reviews published by Digiato, written in Persian, spanning the years when its games desk was at full strength. Its reviewers covered the major releases of the era — fighting games, role-playing games, Nintendo and PlayStation titles — with scored, critical reviews rather than promotional copy.

Eventually the games section outgrew its home. As Ghasemi recounted, the gaming part gradually separated from Digiato and took the name Vigiato, becoming a dedicated games publication in its own right, followed, in his words, by hundreds of thousands of people a day. The spin-off is a marker of Digiato's role as an incubator in Iranian digital media: a section of the site proved large enough to stand alone as one of the country's specialist gaming outlets, while Digiato itself concentrated on technology, business and society.

Voice of the startup ecosystem

Digiato positioned itself early as a chronicler of Iran's startup ecosystem, and other organisations treated it that way. As early as August 2015, the Financial Tribune reported a Startup Grind event in Isfahan — part of the global entrepreneur community's Iranian expansion — held in association with Digiato, describing it as an Iranian technology and business website. Covering startups was not a side topic; it was one of the pillars on which the young site built its identity.

That role matured into original programming. Digiato's "Antek" interview series, broadcast as Instagram Live conversations hosted by Mani Ghasemi himself, put the founder in conversation with the leaders of Iran's digital economy — among them the chief executive of the Firoozeh financial group, discussing the startup ecosystem, the stock market and the venture firm Sarava, and the chief executive of the discount platforms Takhfifan and Netbarg, discussing e-commerce, the pandemic period and women in business. The format — a technology editor interviewing founders and executives live on social media — is the social-first founding idea of Digiato applied to business journalism.

Chronicling Iran's internet

No Iranian technology outlet can avoid the politics of the internet itself, and Digiato has been one of the principal day-by-day chroniclers of connectivity in Iran. When reporting internet outages, it counted them literally: one of its pieces recorded "81 days of internet outage," approaching the two-thousandth hour. During the 2025 war between the United States and Israel and Iran, when international internet access was severely restricted, Digiato — alongside Zoomit and Citna — published numerous reports on the effects of the outage on businesses, cybersecurity, education and daily life.

Its running coverage of the digital economy's human side reaches the same themes from another angle. Digiato's report that Iran had become an "exporter of software developers" — highlighting programmers in Iranian cities delivering projects to clients abroad while working through an internet full of restrictions, and citing the Quera survey finding that only 20 per cent of Iranian programmers had no desire to emigrate — was picked up by international Iran-focused media. In February 2026 Digiato also reported on the large-scale cyberattack that disrupted its Tehran rival Zoomit and the other titles of the Qalam Ayandeh group, part of its continuing coverage of the security and stability of Iran's own internet infrastructure.

Reporting cited beyond Iran

A practical measure of Digiato's standing is how often others rely on its reporting. Iran's English-language Financial Tribune has cited Digiato as its source repeatedly over the years: for the launch of licensed internet television services in Iran in January 2016, and in July 2017 for the communications minister Mahmoud Vaezi's call for Twitter to be unblocked — a story Digiato reported from the minister's own remarks. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report on Iran likewise cited a Digiato report of 2 March 2017 concerning the removal of the Waze navigation app from the Iranian Android store Cafe Bazaar.

Academic and encyclopaedic writing draws on it as well: Digiato's reporting on the ownership disclosure of Digikala, Iran's largest online retailer, is among the sources cited in reference coverage of that company. For a site founded in 2014 by a blogger-turned-reviewer, becoming a cited primary source for international monitors, an English-language business newspaper and reference works is a substantial institutional achievement, and it reflects the scarcity of independent, on-the-record technology reporting from inside Iran.

Community and the social-first model

From its earliest months Digiato described its relationship with readers in unusually warm terms. Its September 2014 message told users that if Digiato had reached its position, it was only because of the readers who had stood beside it at all hours and patiently pointed out its weaknesses, and it framed the site as a different kind of environment — a virtual family working together to make Digiato better. The 44,000 comments received in the first four months suggest the feeling was mutual, and the giveaway that marked the 2.5-million-visit milestone was explicitly an act of thanks for that support.

That community instinct is the human side of the social-media-first strategy the founder described to Donya-e Eqtesad. Digiato was built for an audience that lived on social platforms, expected to talk back, and discovered journalism through sharing rather than newsstands. Its later formats — Instagram Live interviews, continuous social distribution, comment-driven coverage — all extend the same founding insight: in Iran's media market of the 2010s, the community was the distribution network.

Place in Iranian technology media

Digiato today stands as one of the two or three defining names of Persian-language technology journalism, and the clearest example of the online-native generation that displaced print technology magazines in Iran. It was founded in Tehran in 2014 by Mani Ghasemi, grew to more than 35 million visits in its first year, spun off the gaming publication Vigiato, built a flagship interview programme, and became a cited source for international reporting on Iran's internet and startup economy.

Its beat — technology as it is actually lived in Iran, from a developer in a provincial city exporting code to Berlin, to a minister arguing about Twitter, to a nationwide outage counted hour by hour — gives Digiato a documentary value beyond its news cycle. Readers who want to understand how Iran's digital society developed in the decade after 2014 will find much of the record in Digiato's archive, written in Persian, from Tehran, by the generation that built that society.