Business Insider has big expansion plans

Rick Edmonds of The Poynter Institute examines the expansion plans laid out for Business Insider by CEO Henry Blodget.

Edmonds writes, “Henry Blodget, co-founder and CEO of Business Insider/Insider Inc., summoned his staff last Thursday for a start-of-the-new decade meeting and laid on them three heavy growth targets for the next five years:

• A million paid subscribers (vs. about 200,000 now). Insider’s two main sites are free, but the company has also built out a premium Insider Intelligence site and a research business the last few years.
• Total unique visitors per month of a billion  — calculated by including international and platform traffic. That compares to about 375 million currently, Blodget told me.  The company’s U.S. traffic was just under 100 million in December according to Comscore.
• Employing 1,000 journalists and analysts, double its news staff now. Its site lists more than 100 job openings.

“Wildly ambitious? Maybe. But in a conversation with me last week, Blodget shared that Business Insider has come along steadily from the proverbial garage, musing on a blog concept with a pair of partners (on a loading dock actually), to a diversified enterprise in the top rank of digital publishers.”

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