University Canada West recently welcomed Karm Sumal and Farhan Mohamed from the Daily Hive as the latest guests in the university’s speaker series.

The Daily Hive is a massively successful online news platform with over 14 million page views per month and over 4 million unique page visitors per month.

Both Karm, Daily Hive CEO & CO-founder and Farhan, editor-in-chief and partner, discussed their professional journeys in getting their business to where it is today. They also answered questions from students.

Both have a background in business and used it to make the Daily Hive stand out among the other online news sources.

The event was moderated by Jennifer-Lee Gunson a local radio personality who worked for CKNW.

The Daily Hive creates hyper-localized content highlighting the unique qualities of a city. They post multiple stories each day, highlighting new and interesting events, restaurants or happenings.

In 2008 it started out as Vancity Buzz, and it quickly grew to become western Canada’s largest online publication. They changed their name to the Daily Hive in 2016 when they expanded nationally.

They expanded their brand to Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. They also added thematic channels to their portfolio such as Dished, Mapped and Urbanized to tailor the online experience.

They continued to grow as they acquired Colony Digital, a full-service digital agency back in 2018 and The Torontoist, a local online Toronto news source earlier this year.

The company experienced its first big growth during the 2010 Winter Olympics, posting stories about all the different events and activities happening around the city during the two-week event.

They audience grew substantially during the 2011 NHL Stanley Cup Finals involving the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins. They posted multiple articles about where fun and free events were being hosted and where the best place to watch the games would be. Also posting wrap up stories following the riots and its aftermath. All this helped to establish its reputation in Vancouver.

During their talk, they also discussed different aspects of their work and what goes into running and working at a business like the Daily Hive and how they rolled out the expansions.

The students asked questions about the initial idea, how they started, the troubles and challenges they had to overcome.

WRITTEN BY RAFAEL RAMIREZ