From NiemanLab:
Many of the digital news organization that used to be called startups
have outgrown the term — they’re established players by now. Among that
group: the Axel Springer-owned Business Insider, which is turning 10. (Its Silicon Alley Insider brand officially launched July 17, 2007, though the earliest posts were a couple months before.)
The main site hit 50.8 million unique visitors this past May,
according to comScore, up 15 percent from a year ago and placing it
third behind Forbes Digital and Yahoo Finance in the business news sites
category. Its research arm hit 7,500 subscribers the same month. And
with a leg up from Axel Springer, especially in Europe, it continues to
eye new countries for localized editions of BI.
“The digital media industry is just now hitting its stride,” Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget
concluded as we were wrapping up an interview about the company’s goals
as it hits the 10-year mark. “You will see a lot of brands over the
next decade do extremely well.”
Some digital media companies, he suggested, are well positioned to
grow as the television industry gets shaken up in the next decade or
two:
Wang: I saw your
future of digital media slides from 2016
where you highlighted the promise of social video, and those slides
start with the fact that Google and Facebook are taking most of digital
advertising revenue. How do you square spending all these resources, and
are you wary of Facebook?
Blodget: There’s plenty of
worry about everything, always. But first of all, the idea that we’re
going to a 100 percent video world is crazy. There are hundreds of
thousands of stories every day that are far better told in text than in
video. Video is just an opportunity unto itself. We are working in a
medium, along with all of the other digital folks, in which you can tell
stories in four different ways: words, pictures, video, audio. All of
those will continue to grow for the next several decades. It’s not
either/or.
In terms of the platforms, this is again something people are looking
at in the wrong way. If you look at every other media business, there
have always been distribution platforms and content creators. That is
what’s evolving in digital, where you have Google, Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat. It’s very much a symbiotic business, where both sides are
necessary. Our fastest growing revenue streams are coming from Facebook,
Google, and others.
Those dynamics are important, but Facebook has been a wonderful
partner, and we’re working very closely with them on midrolls, and a
number of experiments they’re doing, including longer-form video. So no,
we’re not worried.
Wang: Can you say more about the longer-form video you’re working on with Facebook?
Blodget: So Facebook is
creating a section for longer videos than are typically served within
the feed. They’re working with a lot of partners to develop that, and
we’re one of them.
Wang: These will be news videos?
Blodget: Well…they’re nonfiction. I wouldn’t call them news per se.
Wang: So adding a lot of
video, that’s not unusual. What has Business Insider been investing in
that you think other media companies mostly are not but would be wise to
do so? Things BI does that may seem against the grain right now.
Blodget: I still feel that
we’re still in the early years of what digital will ultimately become.
The industry is similar to the cable industry in the late ’80s, early
’90s, where we’d gone from people thinking that “Oh, this is ridiculous,
there’s no room for anybody but the big three — why would you ever form
a 24-hour cable news network, that would never work!” That was the
early ’80s. By the early ’90s, people said ‘Oh, okay, they work, but
they can only grow so big.”....
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