Founded as a site focused on digital news in New York, Business Insider has the kind of growth and buzz that invite comparisons to the new media darling Huffington Post.
But that’s not necessarily all positive.
Business Insider's rising traffic and expanding verticals are the sunny side of the comparison. And the site recently raised $7 million.
But with a reputation for overly sensational headlines, a more-is-better aggregation policy, the less savory similarities between the sites start to pile up as well.
Business Insider has grown to an audience of 5.6 million uniques a month, according to Comscore (which doesn't include foreign readers). Quantcast shows almost 6 million unique readers per month in the United States, and 9 million globally. The site claims its internal numbers are even higher.
Also read: Business Insider Nabs $7M in Funding
While those numbers still pale in comparison to the 30-plus million uniques the Huffington Post lures monthly, it’s impressive considering the 1.7 million the site drew in January of 2010.
“He’s going after the business voice in a broad sense like Huffington Post did when we first launched it for general news,” Ken Lerer, manager of Lerer Ventures, said of Henry Blodget, Insider’s co-founder and editor-in-chief and once one of the hottest analysts on Wall Street.
Lerer -- an early investor in Insider and friend of Blodget-- would know a thing or two about the HuffPost. He was CEO Arianna Huffington’s co-founder.
Lerer apparently has an affinity for divisive editorial directors: Huffington continues to grow her ardent fan base, but has always been a magnet for criticism given her political rebirths and canny self-promotion. Meanwhile, the SEC went so far as to expel Blodget, a powerful analyst, from the securities industry for civil securities fraud. Needless to say, he remains somewhat controversial in the business community.
Business Insider has grown by going broad -- leaving its tech and digital focus behind, targeting readers from all sectors of the professional world, and adding a series of verticals, from “Tech,” “Wall Street” and “Markets” to topics like “Lifestyle,” “Sports,” “Entertainment” and “Politics.”
Also read: Arianna Huffington: 'Go Ahead, Go On Strike -- No One Will Notice'
Go to its home page and you will see a story on Goldman Sachs or the Groupon IPO, but you will also see prominently displayed pieces on the 2012 election or the NFL.
"Our target audience is anyone interested in business, the goings on of business, executives, anything that executives might be interested in,” Blodget told TheWrap. “The goal is to cover business and economics and focus on several different industries.”
Business Insider has also emphasized content other than standard articles -- slideshows, videos, polls – that are easier to digest but also obvious traffic bait.
In fact, Blodget likes slide shows so much that he breaks news stories into slide-show-sized capsules.
