FIRSTonline turns five today. When on May 23, 2011 our newspaper debuted on the Net, the dream of the founders was to give life to a different, free and alternative voice to the surrounding conformism with a journalism capable, even on the web, of making quality, reliability and creativity the identifying characteristics of an economic and financial information based on experience but also on the freshness of new technological means and digital natives who work alongside long-time captains in the editorial office.
It is not up to us to say whether we have succeeded, but on the occasion of the fifth birthday we can certainly proudly report that three bets have been won. The first and most vital is that of FIRSTonline's economic sustainability: launching a new magazine in times of crisis can be a romantic adventure but, without large capital behind it, it risks lasting the space of a morning. With tireless commitment, many personal sacrifices, constant attention to costs but above all with the strength of ideas and a taste for freedom and independence, we made it: we didn't get rich but the balance sheets are healthy and above all we don't have a euros of debt and we can calmly look to the near future, sincerely thanking the readers, all the collaborators (journalists and technicians) but also those who have not let us miss their free financial support with subscriptions and advertising.
How did we manage to win the bet of economic sustainability, which is the great concern of online information that racks the whole world? In two ways: by creating a very clear editorial model that has given and still gives identity to FIRSTonline - which is not a generalist publication but a vertical centered on economic and financial information, enriched by political, cultural and sporting information - and getting it right right from the The business model was born, which never plunged into the mass market but fed on advertising and corporate subscriptions. But at the basis of economic sustainability there are the other two bets that we have won: that of reputation and that of diffusion.
In terms of reputation, just take a look at the successful series of our weekend Interviews to realize that if the most authoritative economists, academics, bankers, entrepreneurs and politicians talk with pleasure with FIRSTonline it is because our journal a certificate of credibility is gained in the field, which is also confirmed by the signatures that characterize our blogs.
The third and last bet won is that of diffusion: if five years ago any of us had imagined that we would have reached an average of one and a half million page views per month, he would have been mistaken for an incurable dreamer. But this is the reality of FIRSTonline today: one and a half million contacts, easily documented, between direct access to the site and visits to our services distributed on the various platforms on which we are present today and to the social networks on which we are increasingly active. If we consider that we are a vertical, which does not deal with gossip but with very demanding topics such as economic and financial ones, but also political and cultural ones, it is no small achievement, especially if we add that, unlike other famous, we don't drug data and we don't buy traffic.
But what we have achieved so far is not a point of arrival.
The bet we want to make after five years is to grow and reinvent ourselves every day but remaining faithful to our mission, which was and is very clear and which clearly distinguishes us in the jungle of information and the Internet: to inform readers to put them in the condition of KNOWING in order to UNDERSTAND, both through a reasoned selection and a hierarchy of news in real time and through the proposal of a reading key to analyze and understand the reality that is before us.
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Best wishes from President Mattarella to FIRSTonline for its five years.
