Oliver Darcy of Status writes about how Business Insider executives gave the staff Thursday an overview of its performance and its plans for the coming year.
Darcy reports, “The candor suggested Peng is hoping for a reset in 2026. And, by most accounts, she and her leadership team were quite forthcoming on Thursday, doing little to sugarcoat the state of the business during their presentation. Peng highlighted the newsroom’s editorial output—citing 788 scoops last year and noting that more than half of Business Insider’s stories now include exclusive or original reporting—but she was far less rosy about the company’s commercial performance, Status has learned.
“At one point, Peng displayed a slide breaking down Business Insider’s performance across several key business categories in 2025. The picture was lackluster, to put it kindly. Advertising, the slide showed, was ‘off track’ entirely in the first quarter and remained ‘slightly behind’ from the second quarter through the fourth. Subscriptions, long positioned as the centerpiece of Peng’s strategy to reinvent Business Insider for the current media landscape, were only ‘on track’ in a single quarter. In quarters one, two, and four, the business lagged. Meanwhile, premium syndication and partnerships fared better early in the year but fell ‘off track” in the back half of 2025.
“Last two quarters we’ve had a bit of a bumpy go at premium advertising,’ Peng acknowledged, according to an attendee at Thursday’s all-hands meeting.
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