What’s behind the growth of Business Insider’s research group

Max Willens of Digiday writes about Business Insider’s research group, which now has 40 staffers and 7,500 subscribers.

Willens writes, “Over three years later, BI has grown its research group to 40 people, with 7,500 subscribers for $2,500 memberships, and it’s adding its own proprietary research panel, BI Insiders, a 15,000-person research panel, to the mix.

“BI will query that panel about everything from the Amazon Echo Look to mobile payments, and BI will use it to expand research efforts into more areas. It’s also why BI is hiking the cost of the subscription from $2,500 to $3,000. (Institutional, enterprise-level accounts cost quite a bit more, up to $150,000.)

“‘They are the early indicator if a new tech will take off or a new behavior will be adopted,’ said Andrew Sollinger, the vice president in charge of subscriptions at Business Insider, of the BI Insiders panel.

“While Sollinger and the rest of the team are eager to point out their panel contains early-adopting, affluent millennials, it’s a varied bunch: 61 percent of them are Gen Xers and 4 percent are baby boomers, with the rest being that all-important demographic.”

Read more here.