Altervista, the Mondadori Group platform, leader in Italy in the creation, management and hosting of blogs and web sites, is celebrating its 18^th anniversary. Founded on 20 December 2000 by Gianluca Danesin, currently the CTO of the Mondadori Digital Magazine team, Altervista.org has kept its original mission intact: to enable anyone to open a web site, for free and without specific IT skills.

A simple but, at the time, revolutionary, idea the site’s particularity was to focus on user generated content, anticipating the concepts of sharing and interactivity associated with the Web 2.0. Altervista was thus able to build its success thanks to word-of-mouth and the reliability of the service, responding to a new and widespread need to talk about oneself online.

Altervista has been a web pioneer, able to make the most of the potential from the beginning of the digital economy: from the concept of the long tail, which through diversification makes it possible for content created by users to fill a wide range of market niches, to crowdsourcing made possible by continuous exchange and the contributions of volunteers, right up to revenue sharing, the “win-win” system that gives all bloggers the chance to earn money from advertising.

A sustainable business model that today allows Altervista to differentiate itself from other hosting competitors, feeding a consistent ecosystem of blogs and sites able to generate constant attention to the needs of their creators. The exclusive services offered cover professional free areas (also on mobile), unlimited plugins, automatic monetisation, semantic analysis and site clustering.

A “alternative view” of the world of the Internet, thanks to which the Altervista platform is now a “pillar of the Italian web” which currently has over 600,000 active blogs and wen sites. These include a number of leaders in the various sectors of the blogging community in the country: Ho voglia di Dolce (food), Maestra Mary (parenting/education), Spinoza (satire) and i400 calci (cinema) to name just a few, and with the last two having been a warded a number of times at the ai Macchianera Awards in their categories.

Altervista.org celebrates its 18^th anniversary with an audience of 12.6 million monthly users (Source: Comscore – October 2018) and record earnings for its bloggers, thanks to the introduction of new formats and innovative advertising partnerships, with the increasing use of multimedia.