Rafat Ali

Rafat Ali
Rafat Ali speaking at the Skift Europe Forum in London on April 4, 2017.
Alma mater	AMU Indiana University
Occupation	Founder and CEO of Skift
Website	rafat.org

Rafat Ali is the founder and CEO of the travel intelligence media company Skift. Ali was previously founder and CEO of the online media company paidContent and its parent company ContentNext, which he sold to the Guardian Media Group in 2008.

Ali was born in Salford of Greater Manchester in North West England, and was raised in India and the United States.

Ali was the Knight Fellow at Indiana University, where he earned his master's in journalism in 2000. Prior to that he completed his BSc in computer engineering, from AMU in Aligarh, India. Ali lives in New York City with his wife and son. He is a practicing Muslim.

After finishing his degree at Indiana University, Ali moved to New York and worked as a digital media reporter at Inside.com until October 2001, and then as staff writer at Silicon Alley Reporter, where he became managing editor of the publication.

While at Silicon Alley Reporter, Ali started paidContent as a blog and newsletter in 2002 and then dedicated himself to it full-time in early 2003. Started as "a one-man trade newsletter about the business of online media," paidContent developed into an online media company covering the business of digital media, entertainment and information industries. In 2003, paidContent "won a prestigious European Online Journalism Award for News Weblog of the Year." By 2006, the website was receiving 1.5 million page views a month and had 25,000 subscribers to its email newsletter. That same year, ContentNext Media, the parent company of paidContent and its sister websites MocoNews and ContentSutra, received funding from Alan Patricof's venture capital firm Greycroft Partners.