About Qafqazinfo

Qafqazinfo

Qafqazinfo, published at qafqazinfo.az, is an Azerbaijani online newspaper based in Baku. Its name combines Qafqaz, the Azerbaijani word for the Caucasus, with info, and that regional framing is built into its mission: alongside coverage of Azerbaijan's own public, political, social and cultural life, the portal delivers news from other Caucasus countries and from around the world. It publishes in Azerbaijani and Russian and is consistently ranked among the most widely read news websites in Azerbaijan.

Founding and leadership

Qafqazinfo began operations on 16 August 2010. The founder of the website is Elbrus Arud, and its editor-in-chief is Gunel Abilova. Those details are recorded in the portal's Wikipedia entry, which draws on Azerbaijani sources including anniversary coverage published by the portal itself and by Report.az and Modern.az as the site marked seven, thirteen and fourteen years of operation in 2017, 2023 and 2024 respectively. A founding in the summer of 2010 places Qafqazinfo in the generation of Azerbaijani portals that emerged as broadband and mobile internet use expanded and as online news began to displace print as the fastest source of daily information in Baku.

Founder-led continuity is a notable feature. In a media market where ownership is often opaque, Qafqazinfo's public record names both its founder and its editor-in-chief, giving researchers a clearer picture of its leadership than is available for many comparable Azerbaijani sites. The portal has marked its anniversaries publicly, which has also helped fix its founding date in multiple independent Azerbaijani reports rather than in a single self-published claim.

Content and editorial scope

The portal covers Azerbaijan's public, political, social and cultural life, and extends that coverage to the wider Caucasus and to world news. In addition to straight news reports, Qafqazinfo publishes interviews, analytical articles, reports and opinion pieces on various topics. That mix distinguishes it from purely breaking-news aggregators: interviews and analysis form a regular part of its output, and other Azerbaijani outlets and institutions are frequently quoted responding to, or appearing in, its reporting. Its subject range in practice spans government and politics, courts and law enforcement, the economy, education, health, sport, culture and incidents, reflecting the general-interest remit of a national online newspaper.

Readership and rankings

Qafqazinfo's audience position is unusually well documented for an Azerbaijani portal. According to daily, weekly and monthly statistics published by Metrix.az, Azerbaijan's national digital media analytics platform, Qafqazinfo ranks among the top three news sites in the country. In 2021 and 2022 it also ranked among the top ten most searched websites in Azerbaijan on Google. Commercial analytics tell a similar story of a loyal, branded audience: Semrush data for the portal shows the overwhelming share of its organic search traffic coming from searches for its own name, and lists Modern.az and Oxu.az among the sites its audience also visits, placing Qafqazinfo squarely in the leading tier of Baku news portals competing for the same readers.

The Prism UA disinformation resilience study likewise included Qafqazinfo.az in its list, based on Alexa data, of Russian-language news sites appearing in Azerbaijan's top 50 websites overall. That listing underlines the portal's second, Russian-language dimension: it is not only a leading Azerbaijani-language title but also part of the Russian-language information space that remains influential in Baku and across the post-Soviet region.

Languages

Qafqazinfo publishes in Azerbaijani and Russian. The Azerbaijani edition is the primary service for the domestic audience, while Russian-language publication serves Azerbaijan's Russian-speaking population and readers elsewhere in the Caucasus and the wider region who follow Azerbaijani affairs in Russian. Maintaining two language editions is standard practice among Azerbaijan's largest portals, including Day.az, Oxu.az and Haqqin.az, and it materially affects how such outlets are read abroad: researchers, diplomats and neighbouring-country media often encounter Azerbaijani news first through the Russian editions.

Position and external characterisations

External assessments describe Qafqazinfo as aligned with the Azerbaijani government. Its Wikipedia entry describes it as an online newspaper funded and controlled by the Azerbaijani government, and IREX's VIBE reporting on Azerbaijan grouped Qafqazinfo with outlets that represent the government's views, noting that such outlets are often able to mask that alignment with occasional critical pieces on lower-level problems and typically keep their comments sections closed. OCCRP's reporting on the Azerbaijani media environment in 2024 and 2025 cited Qafqazinfo as one of the pro-government outlets that published material targeting detained independent journalists, including a montage of documents said to relate to Toplum TV. Those characterisations are part of the verified record and are included here so readers can place the portal accurately: it is a high-traffic, establishment-aligned national news site, not an independent or opposition outlet.

Notable episodes in the public record

Beyond rankings, Qafqazinfo appears in international reporting as an actor in Azerbaijan's information politics. In December 2023, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that a Qafqazinfo article had claimed an upcoming meeting of Azerbaijani alumni of United States universities amounted to a spy network, reporting that law enforcement agencies were aware of the issue and that the event would be monitored. The United States Embassy cancelled the event. Human rights defenders quoted by RFE/RL described the episode as part of a wider spy hunt atmosphere during a period of tension between Baku and Western governments. The episode is documented here because it is one of the clearest internationally reported examples of the portal's reporting having direct real-world consequences, and it illustrates the role large pro-government portals can play in Azerbaijan's domestic and foreign policy debates.

Qafqazinfo and the Azerbaijani portal model

Qafqazinfo exemplifies the model that came to dominate Azerbaijani online news in the 2010s: a Baku-based, bilingual, high-volume portal combining agency-style breaking news with interviews and commentary, financed and operating within a media environment that press-freedom organisations describe as heavily controlled. Reporters Without Borders has said that virtually the entire media sector in Azerbaijan is under official control, with no independent television or radio transmitted from within the country and critical print newspapers shut down. Within that environment, portals such as Qafqazinfo, Oxu.az and Haqqin.az provide most of the country's day-to-day online news diet, and their rankings and search visibility reflect habitual, mass readership rather than niche appeal.

Regulatory context

Qafqazinfo operates under Azerbaijan's Law on Media, in force since February 2022, and the Media Registry administered by the Media Development Agency. Under the registry rules summarised by Azerbaijan Internet Watch, an online media platform must publish at least 20 articles per day, its founder must be an Azerbaijani citizen permanently residing in the country (or, for a legal entity, majority Azerbaijani-owned), and the outlet must disclose its organisational information and identify a person responsible for editorial content. A portal of Qafqazinfo's scale, publishing continuously in two languages, operates well inside that framework, but the framework itself shapes the formal structure of every registered Azerbaijani online newspaper.

What is not publicly verified

Some details remain outside the verified record. Audited circulation or unique-visitor figures are not published; the audience claims in this profile rest on Metrix.az rankings reported in reference sources, on Google search rankings for 2021-2022, and on commercial analytics snapshots, each of which measures something slightly different. Detailed staffing, revenue and ownership-financing arrangements beyond the external characterisations cited above are not publicly documented, consistent with the general absence of ownership transparency in Azerbaijani media since public access to company ownership records was banned in 2012.

Qafqazinfo today

Qafqazinfo remains an active, Baku-based online newspaper publishing in Azerbaijani and Russian, led by editor-in-chief Gunel Abilova and founded by Elbrus Arud in August 2010. Fifteen years after its launch it retains a top-three position in national web analytics, a top-ten position in national Google search behaviour in the years measured, and a recognised role in Azerbaijan's establishment media landscape. For directory purposes it stands as one of the essential Azerbaijani news portals: general-interest in scope, Caucasus-aware in outlook, bilingual in publication, and firmly part of the pro-government mainstream that dominates online news in the country.