Welcome to Blasting News

Key milestones.

2013: Founded, in Switzerland.

2014: Started global expansion.

2015: Won the INSEAD startup competition at the INSEAD ALUMNI FORUM EUROPE 2015, awarded by leading investors, entrepreneurs and INSEAD professors.

2016: Moved the headquarter to London (United Kingdom).

2016: Awarded by Google DNI (Digital News Innovation Fund), a European programme part of the Google News Initiative, an effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age.

2017: Reached 100 Million monthly unique on-site visitors.

2017: Set up offices and teams in New York.

2018: Exceeded 20,000 original video news published each month and 2,000 contributors active on the platform.

2018: Launched 250+ Channels.

2018: Won the EUNOMIA project funded by the EU (Horizon 2020).

2019: Won the “Battle against misleading information” project funded by the Sicily Region.

The History.

Blasting News was created in 2013 by Andrea Manfredi, a passionate advocate for truthful, fast-paced journalism. Frustrated with the traditional singularity of a newsroom, Andrea decided to create something different. He contracted a handful of freelance journalists mainly focused on news regarding financial and insurance products, and gave them the freedom to embrace their own ideas and opinions. In exchange, he would compensate them according to the number of engaged visitors for their articles on his website.

The freelancers loved the idea and decided to invite more people to write for the website. In less than three months, Blasting News had dozens of contributors, and by June 2013, the website had 2 million monthly unique visitors.

After observing the rapid growth, and to give more diversity for the contributors (now termed Blasters) to write and therefore drive more readership, Andrea and his team decided to organize Blasting News into different categories, including Politics, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports, among others.

Due to the high volume of articles being produced in a short period of time, Reviewers were hired as curators of Blasting News to check every single article prior to publishing. Reviewers were given the power to approve, reject and amend every piece of content to make sure that false, sensationalist and clickbaiting news was filtered out. Proprietary technology was also created to detect errors and ensure that the website was free of plagiarism, offensive content, veracity, and any other issues.

In addition to Blasters, and in order to drive more engaged readership to Blasting News, in 2016 social media influencers (now termed Social Blasters) were offered the opportunity to be remunerated for sharing popular content, according to their preferred subjects, to generate more traffic. From that moment on, Blasting News became an all-in-one platform where production and distribution of content work together: where the main goal is to develop systems that promote the dissemination of information.

In 2016, Blasting News won the Google DNI awards.

After reaching 100 million monthly unique visitors in 2017 and growing its user base and content production rate—20,000-25,000 news articles each month and 20,000-25,000 videos each month—Blasting News decided to improve its product and service by creating Channels. Channels are vertical, proprietary social networks around niche topics, where readers can subscribe and engage with content and other readers. With Channels, Blasting News aims to provide its readers with the best content available online around the topics they care about, also by opening its platform to third-party content.

As part of its accelerated growth strategy, Blasting News is also currently branching out and creating new products and tools that will help other publishers, business owners, and Blasters create engaged communities and further enrich their publishing capabilities, especially in the video ecosystem.