German publishing giant Axel Springer is closing in on a deal to buy Business Insider, in a deal that would value the Web publisher at around $560 million, reports Peter Kafka of Re/code.
Kafka writes, “Business Insider hasn’t disclosed its revenues recently. In 2013, it did around $20 million. In January, when Blodget announced his latest funding round, he said revenues had grown 70 percent in 2014, and that the company was ‘solidly profitable’ in the second half of the year.
“A few months later, Business Insider COO Julie Hansen said the company wasn’t profitable, because it was plowing resources into expansion. It has recently launched a U.K. edition as well as TechInsider, a site dedicated to ‘tech, science, innovation, and culture,’ as well as Insider, a publishing project that aims to push most of its content to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“In the last few years, a flurry of investors have placed increasingly big bets on digital publishers, in the hopes they have figured out how to find — and make money from — young audiences that are abandoning traditional media like newspapers and television. This summer, for instance, Comcast’s NBCUniversal put $200 million into BuzzFeed and another $200 million into Vox Media, which owns this site. Those investments valued those companies at $1.5 billion and around $1 billion respectively.”
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