FIRSTonline celebrates today its first seven years of life. And it does so with legitimate pride. If the bet of 23 May 2011, the day not by chance dedicated to Saint Desiderio, was to create a web journal of economics and finance that stood out from the crowd and made its freedom of judgement, its competence, its reliability and Last but not least, his creativity, his unmistakable identity traits, the results achieved speak for themselves.
We are one of the very rare Italian sites that has demonstrated in practice that it can be economically sustainable with its own strength alone and that every day makes quality information its mission, knowing however that we must continually renew ourselves in a fast-moving world.
Our way of celebrating is not to rest on our laurels but to constantly raise the bar, identifying new lenses in step with evolution of the world around us and of the online publishing of which we are a part. Growing in quality has always been our ambition and it is today more than ever.
Three novelties happily accompany our seventh birthday. The first is audience growth. Giant leaps from its origins. Today FIRSTonline collects, during the week, between 45 and 50 thousand views a day with a reading time of its contents much higher than the average of sites, confirming the interest and appreciation for what we write and testifying to the fact that the originality and independence of our editorial services has allowed us to gradually climb the ranking of search engines. Fifty thousand average visits, with even higher peaks on peak days of the week, approach the threshold of one and a half million views per month which, net of our presence on our social networks, becomes around two million if you add up to the views that the contents of FIRSTonline collect on the Microsoft portal (www.msn.it) of which we have been the official suppliers of services for the economy and finance for years.
They are data, transparent and certifiable, for which we must first of all thank the readers and which encourage us to grow without losing our distinctive characteristics. This is why we have put in the pipeline – and this is the second novelty – the creation of new vertical satellite sites on which to raise the quality of information even further and on which to experiment with new business models through the provision of paid services. The first of the new sites is already there and saw the light at the end of April: è FIRST Art which is aimed at the public of enthusiasts and professionals from the world and the art market and culture in general. Three more verticals are in preparation for the next few months and it is possible that at least one will see the light of day before the summer.
The third novelty, launched just a few weeks ago, is an evolution of the business and is represented by Media Solutions, one of our business divisions that is able to design, create and manage sites and apps for third parties, companies or individuals. Its purpose is twofold: to make available to the public the professional and technological skills that we have acquired and refined in these first seven years and to gather resources to invest in quality information, which are and remain the primary raison d'être of our sites .
Three innovations that open up new horizons and that once again are a bet and an act of faith in the future in the belief that, sooner or later, independence and quality pay off.
