Bloomberg Media CEO Smith marks a year of digital growth

Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith sent the following email to his staff on Tuesday:

Over the last year, Bloomberg Media’s digital businesses have continued to grow at a brisk pace. Our audience is increasing in size and users are spending far more time with our content than before. The numbers are impressive—especially when you consider that we launched BloombergBusiness.com just one year ago.

In December, BloombergBusiness.com attracted 27.7 million unique visitors, according to comScore—a 29% increase year-over-year. User engagement increased 125% year-over-year, realizing a high of 9.9 minutes spent per visit in December. Bloomberg mobile unique visitors grew 42% year-over-year.

We had our best traffic day of the year on December 17th, 2015 driven by our coverage of the Federal Reserve rate decision and Christie Smythe and Keri Geiger’s scoop on the controversial pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli. Several beautifully designed features also helped drive December’s record traffic–Karen Weise’s deep-dive inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price, Ashlee Vance’s feature on a 26-year-old hacker who built a self-driving car, and an interactive Star Wars data visualization titled “Star Wars: The Force Accounted.”

Our unique, deeply-reported features and data-rich graphics have been key drivers of our audience growth. Traffic to features and graphics increased 254% from November to December. The best performing story of 2015 was the data visualization produced by the Bloomberg Graphics team titled “What’s Really Warming the World”, followed by the “What Is Code” essay by Paul Ford, winner of the prestigious 2016 Ellie for a single-topic issue from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Bloomberg Graphics has consistently produced outstanding work that has caught the attention of key influencers. Just last week, President Obama tweeted our piece titled “2015 Was The Hottest Year On Record.”

Perhaps our greatest metrics success is in the area of digital video. Bloomberg held the #1 and #2 positions in comScore’s global business and finance video category for seven months in 2015. In December, we recorded 19.2 million video UVs, an all-time record for the network. Streams increased 105% year-over-year, hitting 159 million video streams. December was also Bloomberg Politics’ best month in video since launching in October 2014, with 2.1 million video UVs and 7.3 million streams.

Congratulations on the progress we have made so far. Under Scott Havens and Jed Sandberg’s leadership, 2016 will be a year with many new digital initiatives and innovations. Thanks to all of you for helping us to solidify our position as the leading global, multi-platform business and financial media organization.

There is much more to come.