Business Insider quietly lifted its paywall recently, reports Oliver Darcy of Status.
Darcy reports, “The change was not announced publicly—perhaps because it directly undercuts the story chief executive Barbara Peng and Editor-In-Chief Jamie Heller have spent the past year trying to sell to staff and readers: that BI was moving away from the old traffic hamster wheel and toward a subscription-centered future built on producing journalism worth paying for.
“But weaning a website like BI away from a traffic-centric model is no easy feat. The speed-obsessed publication was engineered to dominate search websites like Google, and for years its audience grew accustomed to consuming its journalism for free. Once the company erected a stiff paywall, traffic cratered. According to a SimilarWeb analysis provided to Status, the site drew 104 million visits in September 2024; in comparison, this September, it drew just 64.4 million—a staggering 38% year-over-year drop, and among the lowest levels in recent memory.”
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