Categories: OLD Media Moves

Business Insider revenue grew 45 percent in 2017

Henry Blodget

Business Insider editorial director and founder Henry Blodget sent out the following announcement on Friday:

Team,

Great to see so many of you this week at the All-Hands. Congratulations again on our amazing 2017. This note recaps some of what we covered in the meeting and goes into a bit more depth.

Last year was one of the best years in our history.

We continued to strengthen our journalism and storytelling. We expanded our global editorial team to 330 journalists (including 80 at our license partners). We grew our audience and engagement to new records. We rebuilt our technology platforms to speed up our pages, accelerate our publishing and innovation, and support our increasing scale. We grew our revenue more than 45%. We also designed, built, and moved into our new global headquarters.

A decade into our existence, we serve a global monthly audience of more than 400 million people, nearly halfway to our long-term goal of 1 billion. Our stories generate more than 5 billion views a month. Our on-site audience, as measured by Comscore, grew to 144 million uniques. Our social followers now surpass 100 million. We have a global team of 488 colleagues  — 243 men and 245 women. We have three thriving revenue streams. Our publishing and distribution platforms are among the best in the industry.

In short, we had a great finish to a remarkable first decade. We have also built a strong foundation for the next 10 years and beyond.

Our greatest strength is our journalism and storytelling.

Business Insider remains the world’s favorite business news brand, surpassing 135 million global uniques for the first time. Some stand-out stories last year include Hayley Peterson on the implosion of Sears; a multimedia series called “Un-dividing America”; and interviews with John Kasich, Governor of Ohio and 2016 GOP presidential candidate; Oscar Munoz, CEO of United Airlines; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase; and Rick Rieder, who oversees $1.7 trillion as Global Chief Investment Officer of fixed income at BlackRock. We visited performance-guru Tony Robbins at his house in Fiji and swam in his favorite waterfall. We even test-drove a Tesla Model X across America.

Our editorial team continued to innovate, debuting a podcast series, several successful episodic series and Facebook Watch programs, and new verticals like “Cars Insider.” We launched our first mobile TV show, “The Bottom Line,” a social-and-digital first program covering finance and markets, presented by Fidelity. We added “summary bullets” to our stories, making our experience more convenient and saving our readers time. We held our 8th annual IGNITION conference, which many attendees said was our best ever. We grew our new market data and news site, Markets Insider, more than 20% per month and saw an eightfold increase in pageviews. We launched our first consumer subscription service, “BI Prime,” which is already off to an excellent start.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

Recent Posts

Is this the end of CoinDesk as we know it?

Former CoinDesk editorial staffer Michael McSweeney writes about the recent happenings at the cryptocurrency news site, where…

6 hours ago

LinkedIn finance editor Singh departs

Manas Pratap Singh, finance editor for LinkedIn News Europe, has left for a new opportunity…

1 day ago

Washington Post announces start of third newsroom

Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray sent out the following on Friday: Dear All, Over the last…

2 days ago

FT hires Moens to cover competition and tech in Brussels

The Financial Times has hired Barbara Moens to cover competition and tech in Brussels. She will start…

2 days ago

Deputy tech editor Haselton departs CNBC for The Verge

CNBC.com deputy technology editor Todd Haselton is leaving the news organization for a job at The Verge.…

2 days ago

“Power Lunch” co-anchor Tyler Mathisen is leaving CNBC

Note from CNBC Business News senior vice president Dan Colarusso: After more than 27 years…

2 days ago