Taylor Ablitt, HBA ’10, runs the second-largest social entertainment website in the world.
London, Ont.-based Diply.com could follow in the footsteps of other successful social media companies and move its headquarters to a larger city such as Toronto, New York or even Silicon Valley.
After all, Diply is the world’s second-largest social entertainment website and about 50 per cent of its traffic is from the U.S., compared to just five per cent in Canada and the remaining 45 per cent coming from other parts of the world. Diply, a news aggregate website, also works with global brands such as Virgin Group, Delta Air Lines, and Madison Square Garden.
Still, the company is committed to staying in London, where its founders met and have grown the business to become among the top 100 most popular websites in the world in less than three years—drawing more traffic than Craigslist, CNN, ESPN.GO.com and NYTimes.com. Diply, which collects and distributes information on everything from celebrity gossip to health and beauty tips, has about 194-million users and reached 1.9-billion page views, based on Google Analytics as of spring 2016.
“London is a great city for talent. There’s a ton of talent coming out of schools like Western University, Ivey, and elsewhere,” says Ivey alumnus Taylor Ablitt, who co-founded the company, along with Western graduate Dean Elkholy and local tech entrepreneur Gary Manning.
Ablitt moved to London in 2006 from his hometown of Sudbury, Ont., to study science at Western. His plan was to be an orthodontist. However, after the first year Ablitt became more interested in business—entrepreneurship in particular—and obtained his degree from Ivey instead.
Upon graduation, and after working for about three and a half years at London-based Trojan Technologies, he and Elkholy started working on a content site called GoViral. It was after meeting Manning at a conference and bringing him on board that the business model for Diply was fully formed. The site launched in November 2013 and cracked the top 10,000 website list in its first 30 days. “That’s when we kind of knew we had something,” says Ablitt.
In 2015, he says the company really made its mark. Revenue grew 400 per cent, compared to a year earlier, and is expected to grow another 50 per cent from that base in 2016.
The company also grew from 15 people to 130 in 2015, and Ablitt says the plan is to double that staff size in the next couple of years. The company also opened marketing and sales offices in Toronto and New York to help stay connected to its global market of users and brands.
“It’s been a wild ride,” says Ablitt. “A lot of the success I’ve had in London is because of the relationships I built from Ivey.”
Photo: Gabe Ramos
