Insider now has 100K news subscribers, 250K total subscribers

Henry Blodget

William Turvill of Press Gazette examined the growth of Insider under co-founder and CEO Henry Blodget.

Turvill writes, “Insider has more than 100,000 paying subscribers to its news site (it launched its Prime service in 2017). Blodget says that the group overall now has around 250,000 subscribers across its news site and B2B operations.

“Insider’s growing subscription business means it is now less dependent on advertising, and this is one of the reasons it was able to continue growing through the Covid-19 crisis.

“What does the future hold for the wider digital media sector? Will more companies merge, as BuzzFeed and HuffPost did last year? Will Insider continue growing through acquisitions?

“‘I think the industry will continue to consolidate,’ says Blodget. ‘I think the main problem is there are way too many companies.

“‘And that’s not just the digital start-ups or new companies – it is every surviving legacy media company, who now realise that digital is a big part of the future. They’re directing enormous resources into their digital, and so you have a lot of very well-funded companies doing that.'”

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.