Business Insider editorial director and founder Henry Blodget sent out the following announcement on Friday:
Team,
Great to see so many of you this week at the All-Hands. Congratulations again on our amazing 2017. This note recaps some of what we covered in the meeting and goes into a bit more depth.
Last year was one of the best years in our history.
We continued to strengthen our journalism and storytelling. We expanded our global editorial team to 330 journalists (including 80 at our license partners). We grew our audience and engagement to new records. We rebuilt our technology platforms to speed up our pages, accelerate our publishing and innovation, and support our increasing scale. We grew our revenue more than 45%. We also designed, built, and moved into our new global headquarters.
A decade into our existence, we serve a global monthly audience of more than 400 million people, nearly halfway to our long-term goal of 1 billion. Our stories generate more than 5 billion views a month. Our on-site audience, as measured by Comscore, grew to 144 million uniques. Our social followers now surpass 100 million. We have a global team of 488 colleagues — 243 men and 245 women. We have three thriving revenue streams. Our publishing and distribution platforms are among the best in the industry.
In short, we had a great finish to a remarkable first decade. We have also built a strong foundation for the next 10 years and beyond.
Our greatest strength is our journalism and storytelling.
Business Insider remains the world’s favorite business news brand, surpassing 135 million global uniques for the first time. Some stand-out stories last year include Hayley Peterson on the implosion of Sears; a multimedia series called “Un-dividing America”; and interviews with John Kasich, Governor of Ohio and 2016 GOP presidential candidate; Oscar Munoz, CEO of United Airlines; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; and Rick Rieder, who oversees $1.7 trillion as Global Chief Investment Officer of fixed income at BlackRock. We visited performance-guru Tony Robbins at his house in Fiji and swam in his favorite waterfall. We even test-drove a Tesla Model X across America.
Our editorial team continued to innovate, debuting a podcast series, several successful episodic series and Facebook Watch programs, and new verticals like “Cars Insider.” We launched our first mobile TV show, “The Bottom Line,” a social-and-digital first program covering finance and markets, presented by Fidelity. We added “summary bullets” to our stories, making our experience more convenient and saving our readers time. We held our 8th annual IGNITION conference, which many attendees said was our best ever. We grew our new market data and news site, Markets Insider, more than 20% per month and saw an eightfold increase in pageviews. We launched our first consumer subscription service, “BI Prime,” which is already off to an excellent start.
Read more here.
