Independent and Profitable, Digital Trends Aims to Redefine Tech Media

Asked whether, back in 2006, he could have possibly envisioned that the tech review blog he co-founded, using rented office space above an Oregon furniture store, would one day grow into a profitable digital media enterprise spanning three offices on two coasts and attracting talent from the likes of Facebook and The New York Times Co., CEO Ian Bell responds first by laughing out loud. "Never." Fourteen years later, Digital Trends has done exactly that, drawing more than 30 million unique visitors to its site each month—an audience that balloons to more than 100 million when accounting for distributed content, video and social media—all without taking on outside funding or compromising on its core mantra, "Tech for the way you live," laid out from the beginning by Bell and his co-founder, CTO Dan Gaul, and permeating every aspect of the company's strategy from business to editorial. "We’ve always had a passion for the aesthetics of products and what they could actually help you achieve: connect you to other people, save time in your day, enhance your experiences in general," says Bell. "Everyone else was focused on specifications, stats, benchmarks, but they never really applied those to a better life experience. Hardware and specifications mean nothing if you aren’t able to enjoy a better experience." If the driving force behind the Digital Trends' evolution from blog to website to cross-platform operation is, as all of the staffers we spoke to asserted, strong,... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'

[ Folio Magazine | 2020-03-31 17:01:10 UTC ]

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