The inside of Business Insider

Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst who started the Business Insider website, gave a presentation Wednesday at a Folio conference in which he released details of the business news websites operation.

Here are some of the numbers:

Business Insider’s audience continues to grow rapidly: It is now read by 23 million unique visitors a month.
Five years ago, when it launched, it had about 1,000 visitors the first day. Now it regularly has more than 1 million a day.
Contrary to what you occasionally hear, “social” is not the be-all and end-all for digital news sites (in fact, the importance of “social” is grossly overstated). Business Insider readership is a healthy mix of 1) regular readers who come directly to the site, 2) readers who find stories via social and other referral links, 3) readers who find stories via search, and 4) regular readers who find stories via email, RSS feeds, and other distribution channels.
About 30% of its traffic is now mobile (including both tablets and smartphones.) The iPhone is the dominant mobile device used by Business Insider readers, followed by the iPad and Android devices.

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.