Business Insider readership up 48 percent in past year

Dominic Rushe of The Guardian writes about Business Insider and its growth as it expands into Europe.

Rushe writes, “The eminently clickable, caps-heavy headlines are typical BI fare. The sort of stories that ComScore calculates brought it 26 million readers a month on desktop and mobile in May – more than WSJ.com’s 21 million. They are also the sort of stories that have plenty of critics worried about the dumbing down of journalism. It works for readers. Traffic in the US is up 48% in the past year according to ComScore. In Britain it has risen 36% although the company doesn’t have a UK office. All that changeson Monday with the appointment of former CBS Interactive vice president Julian Childs as managing director of Business Insider UK, who, along with BI deputy editor Jim Edwards, will now start recruiting a London-based team to cover Europe.

“We meet in the boardroom, labelled the War Room. In person Blodget defuses the combative impression left by the standing army of desks and threats of world domination. He is smart, approachable, introspective – a far cry from the old-school media mogul epitomised by the sinister whispering mode of Rupert Murdoch.

“In part that’s because he sees himself as in the service industry rather than as a ‘broadcaster’, and also – like his peers – he has a long way to go to rival Murdoch’s reach. ‘The rise of social media has changed the way people find information, especially media, fundamentally,’ he says. When BI started seven years ago Twitter and Facebook were not ways of finding news. BI could do a valuable service simply by aggregating interesting information in a single place. ‘When you have a billion people on Facebook each of whom has a customised front page, there is less reason for people to check a website.’ Digital media companies need to find that audience, he argues.”