Interia, formerly Interia.pl, is a large Polishweb portal created in 2000 in Kraków, Poland. It offers, among others: new email accounts, free web hosting, and domain name registration. The list of its 130 services includes the national and international headlines in the Polish language followed by business news, sports, motorization and new technologies, as well as online games, blogs, chat rooms, internet forums and a shopping arcade, not to mention the streaming radio and Internet television channels. Interia hosts one of Polish online encyclopedias, the Encyklopedia Internautica and the thematic catalogue of websites. It features also the weather info, astrology, virtual greeting cards popular locally, and hundreds of online chats with the "KidProtect" option. In April 2009, Interia counted as No. 167 among "The top 500 sites on the web", and No. 166 in its Alexa's own "Traffic Rank". The most up-to-date statistics' summary by Alexa Internet generated for 2011, ranks Interia as the No. 686 in the world according to a three-month traffic trailing,. Approximately 89% of visitors to the site come from Poland where it has attained a traffic rank of No. 11. This site can be found in the Polish "Portale" category of websites. "Compared with internet averages – wrote Alexa – this site's audience tends to be users who have postgraduate educations; it also appeals more to childless men between the ages of 25 and 35 who browse from work. Interia has a bounce rate of about 29%." According to Alexa own rankings dating back to February 2008, it was the 8th most popular site in Poland at that time. The portal was created by the ComArch ManagementITcorporation and the RMF FM radio. The Interia S.A. company is almost wholly owned by RMF FM parent company, the Bauer Verlagsgruppe, represented by Witold Woźniak. Bauer bought 96,6% of its shares in September 2008 and controls 99% of its vote. Due to its availability and relaxed internal policy, the free hosting service Interia has become a popular spam redirector in recent time. Spammers frequently link to its free sub-domains in their spam campaigns to avoid having their messages easily detected as junk and automatically blocked. Although, there are many legitimate webpages as well as services listed at Interia, spammers sign up for its free accounts in volumes similar to GeoCities, although their perennial favorite seems to be Google's Blogspot based in the US. The redirect pages created by spammers at Interia link only to spamvertising.
