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A Big ‘Thank You’ To Our Readers And Clients…

business insider group shot
business insider group shot

Daniel Goodman

Many members of our Business Insider team after we moved into our new office last summer.

A quick note of thanks to you, our readers and clients, for helping us reach this point.

As Lukas Alpert of the Wall Street Journal reported, we just announced some exciting news: A major new round of funding from the German media company Axel Springer, as well as Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners, and RRE Ventures. This capital will help us continue to invest in making Business Insider better for you.

When we launched the company 7 years ago, we never dreamed that we would eventually be read by so many of you. In those days, “we” was three of us writing from the elevator loading dock of another startup. Every once in a while, the elevator door would open, and we would all squish over to the side while the FreshDirect folks delivered snacks and sodas to the other startup.

About a thousand of you dropped by the first day, which seemed like a lot. Seven years later, Comscore tells us that 35 million of you visit us each month in the U.S. alone. That has made us the No. 1 business news and information site in the country. 

We also have 7 international editions of Business Insider now — in Australia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, China, and the UK — and another 5+ million of you read those each month. In November, we launched Business Insider UK — from a loading-dock-like office in London’s “Silicon Roundabout.” Our Australia edition is the No. 1 business publication in Australia, and our UK readership has grown by 50% in the three months since the launch.

There are 200 of us now, and we can afford our own snacks and groceries, but we still have the same goal we did back in the loading-dock days. Make Business Insider better for you every day.

Thank you again for reading and working with us. I have included the note I just sent to our team below.

– Henry Blodget, Co-Founder, Editor, and CEO

Dear Team,

I am pleased to tell you that we have just closed a $25 million investment round led by the German media company Axel Springer. Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, and other of our existing investors also increased their investments in the company.

Axel Springer is one of the world’s leading news organizations. Founded in 1946, the company is headquartered in Berlin and produces dozens of newspapers, magazines,, and digital services in 40 countries. Axel Springer’s German publications include the national daily newspapers Die Welt and Bild, the latter of which has the largest daily circulation in Europe. More than half of the company’s revenue comes from digital services.

This investment will allow us to continue to do what we have done for the past seven years: Invest in high-quality native digital journalism with the goal of becoming the world’s biggest and best source of business news and information.

Last year we reached some remarkable milestones:

* We became the No. 1 business news brand in the U.S., with 35 million readers a month (comScore)

* We grew our video journalism to 10 million monthly streams on Business Insider alone. 

* We launched Business Insider UK, our 7th international edition. Monthly readership at BI UK has grown more than 50% since the November launch.

* We developed a new version of Viking, our proprietary real-time publishing and distribution platform. Viking is the foundation of everything we do, and it is one of the most sophisticated and powerful content platforms in the industry.

* We expanded our readership among the new generation of business leaders. The shift to digital is generational, with today’s younger professionals finding and sharing news and information profoundly differently than prior generations. Business Insider reaches this digital generation, including a quarter of the millennials in the US.

* We improved the scope, quality, and impact of our journalism:

* We continued to lead the business news industry in native and programmatic marketing solutions, adding dozens of new clients in telecom, technology, financial services, automotive, transportation, and luxury sectors. Our annual revenue increased nearly 70%, and we were solidly profitable in the back half of the year.

Seven years ago, when we launched Business Insider, there were widespread questions about whether the digital medium could support thriving native-digital news organizations and journalism. Thankfully, those questions have now been answered. The digital medium is by far the most powerful, flexible, and influential journalistic medium ever invented, and it gets stronger every day. The generational shift to digital will allow high-quality native digital news organizations to grow and improve for decades.

Congratulations to all of you on making such remarkable progress for our readers and clients over the past year.  It is a privilege and pleasure to work with you.  We’ll have more to share about our plans in the coming weeks. We are just getting started.

 

 

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