Can Business Insider be successful?

Michael Wolff of USA Today writes about Business Insider and whether it can achieve long-term success.

Wolff writes, “Again and again, Business Insider has framed the most basic question about how to make a digital publishing business supported by advertising work — without coming up with an answer.

“It began as Silicon Alley Insider, founded by former Doubleclick CEO Kevin Ryan with Henry Blodget, a securities analyst who, after being sanctioned by the SEC for dotcom excesses and banned from the securities industry for life, turned to journalism. But the tech emphasis quickly proved to offer a too-limited ad slice for a solely ad-driven business. This was rather a first warning sign: Even highly targeted digital media could not produce premium rates. So it went broader. It switched its moniker to Business Insider and reduced its financial business to a subbrand Clusterstock (later changed to BI Finance), and tried to duplicate The Huffington Post model of aggregating lots of clever-headlined content with a general business theme in an effort to produce maximum traffic. And this succeeded. Business Insider carved a reputation, along with HuffPo, BuzzFeed and Upworthy, as quite a traffic phenomenon.

“But then the digital ad market collapsed, undermined by programmatic and vast, cheap mobile offerings, meaning ever-more traffic — more and more costly to acquire — was necessary to maintain growth.”

Read more here.