Jonathon Francis and David Arabov: Millenials Creating Content for Millenials

Jonathon Francis and David Arabov, the co-founders of Elite Daily, are certainly part of the generation known as millenials – the people born between 1980 and 1995, who are tech-savvy with virtually every gadget available, and who can multitask in ways that Generation X cannot. Indeed, the duo started a digital media company that prides itself on being The Voice of Generation Y – that’s millenials to the rest of us.

Francis and Arabov, along with Gerard Adams, started Elite Daily in February 2012, as a content aggregator site for millenials – or as they say it, The Huffington Post for Generation Y – despite their zero experience in the industry. The duo, then undergraduates of Pace University, pooled $60,000 to start the company but have since raised additional funding.

The pair had to learn hard lessons about running a digital media company, lessons learned through trial and error. But the site soon took off such that by the end of 2013, it already had 41 million monthly readers and earned $400,000 – and counting. Elite Daily has also grown in its mix of direct traffic (20%), search engine optimization (10%), and social media traffic (70%) with 50% of the latter coming from Facebook. At present, the company employs 60 young people and enjoys 28.5 million unique views per month.

The duo wanted to compete with larger digital media companies, such as Business Insider, Vox, and Mic, but was unable to do so because of the lean operating budget; the company was profitable, nonetheless, but growth is must for digital companies. They decided to go the financing route and flew to the west coast for this purpose but fate had other plans.

Elite Daily was purchased by Daily Mail in a deal that combined the readership base between the two companies. The deal, which was rumoured to cost between $40 million and $50 million, was beneficial to both companies especially as there was a 10% overlap between their readerships.