Nicolas Chretien

President & Founder Crakmedia (Crakmedia Network)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Nicolas Chretien is president and a co-founder of Crakmedia, a Quebec City company that turns web traffic into advertising revenue at international scale from a base most of its peers would consider peripheral. He started it in 2006 with two collaborators from a humour website they had built two years earlier, and the decisive early move was a pivot: having considered building a video-sharing service, the three instead went into traffic monetisation and wrote their own statistics and campaign-management tooling, which became the company’s actual asset. By 2016 the business had roughly 17,000 affiliate customers and drew 98% of its revenue from outside Canada. Chretien became the controlling owner in 2015 when he bought out a departing co-founder, and has run it since — latterly with a visible emphasis on being a good employer and a local philanthropic presence, culminating in a place on Canada’s Top Small and Medium Employers list for 2026.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Crakmedia in Quebec City in 2006 with Xavier Farooghi and Frederic Hains; president and controlling owner since 2015.
• Pivoted the founding idea from video sharing to traffic monetisation, building in-house statistics and advertising campaign management software rather than licensing it.
• Reached roughly 17,000 affiliate customers by 2016, with 98% of business coming from abroad; the company now claims around 1.5 billion ad impressions a day across more than 150 countries.
• Named to Canada’s Top Small and Medium Employers for 2026, a Globe and Mail programme assessing workplace culture and HR practice across eight criteria.
• SME of the Year at the 2018 Mercuriades, the awards of the Federation des chambres de commerce du Quebec.
• 31st in Deloitte’s Canadian Technology Fast 50 and 242nd in the Technology Fast 500 in 2015; 6th-fastest-growing company in Quebec by L’Actualite in 2015 and 16th in 2016.
• Committed the company to a three-year, $75,000 partnership with the Fondation du CHU de Quebec in November 2024.

Professional Journey

The company’s origin is a side project. In 2004 Chretien, Xavier Farooghi and Frederic Hains built a humour website together — no source located names it — and in 2006 turned the collaboration into a business. Their first instinct was to make it a video-sharing platform, which in 2006 would have put them against an already-crowded field. They went the other way, into traffic monetisation, and built their own statistics platform and advertising campaign management tools rather than buying them in. That decision is what separated Crakmedia from the many affiliate networks of the period that were essentially reselling somebody else’s infrastructure.

Growth came from abroad almost immediately. By 2016 the company had around 17,000 affiliate customers and 98% of its business originated outside Canada, an unusual profile for a Quebec City firm and one that made it a conspicuous local success story. L’Actualite ranked it the sixth-fastest-growing company in Quebec in 2015 and sixteenth in 2016; Deloitte placed it 31st on its Canadian Technology Fast 50 and 242nd on the Fast 500 in the same period.

Ownership consolidated in 2015, when Farooghi left the company and Chretien acquired his shares, leaving him the controlling owner. The same year brought a legal vindication: a patent infringement suit filed against Crakmedia by Essociate in 2014 ended with a US District Court ruling in the company’s favour, invalidating the patent that had been asserted.

More recent years have been defined less by growth rankings than by institutional recognition. The Federation des chambres de commerce du Quebec named Crakmedia SME of the Year at the 2018 Mercuriades. In November 2024 Chretien committed the company to a three-year, $75,000 philanthropic partnership with the Fondation du CHU de Quebec, funding research, medical equipment and the construction of a new hospital complex for CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval; “doing good and doing it well”, he said, was a preoccupation of his as an entrepreneur. And in May 2026 Crakmedia was named one of Canada’s Top Small and Medium Employers, a Globe and Mail programme in its thirteenth year, on which Chretien’s comment was that investment in talent is the foundation of performance.

The company today runs from Quebec City with a second office in Montreal, organised into R&D and IT, sales and marketing, creative services, SEO, administration and business intelligence, and says its advertising reaches around 1.5 billion impressions a day in more than 150 countries.

Education

No education could be established for Nicolas Chretien. Wikipedia’s article on the company carries no personal biography, the company’s own site has no leadership page, and neither of the press releases read for this profile gives any educational background. This was searched for rather than assumed, and remains an open question.