The chief executive of financial news site Business Insider is considering developing a range of new digital brands, as the US company continues its global expansion with Tuesday’s launch of a UK edition.
Business Insider UK, which has about 10 staff, is the seventh international version after launches in countries including Australia, China, Singapore and Malaysia through partnerships.
The UK site, which is edited by Business Insider veteran Jim Edwards, will focus on the core sectors of finance, technology, politics and strategy.
However, Henry Blodget, the co-founder and chief executive of Business Insider, said the seven-year-old US-based company has reached the scale and has the financial muscle to look to launch new digital content brands outside of its core area of business and financial news.
The company has investors including Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post, RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners.
“I do expect the industry to consolidate at some point,” said Blodget, speaking in London ahead of Tuesday’s UK launch. “I don’t know whether we will be consolidated or we will be a consolidator. The bigger we get and the more we have invested in technology and sales, the more sense it makes for us to consider having other publications in the company focusing on different markets other than business. That is very typical in media companies, most TV companies have several networks for example.”
While launching new brands might be on the strategic horizon, a more pressing concern will be taking on the UK digital operations of rivals including the Financial Times, Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal Europe.
Blodget said Business Insider UK will be “complementary and competitive” with the FT, but his general view is that traditional print publishers are not at the leading edge of the digital revolution.
“We are a native digital business publication,” he said. “Our model is better serving digital readers than the digital operations of a lot of traditional companies. It is not the thrust of the publication for a lot of traditional publishers – digital is a secondary concern. We are reaching a new generation of readers … 10 years younger than competitors. We are not trying to be a newspaper, we are not trying to produce TV journalism. We are 100% focused on digital.”
The company is aiming to significantly grow the amount of web traffic it receives from the UK – currently 5% of global usage – and he is not too concerned about the impact of the deep-pocketed BBC digital news service.
“The BBC could never exist in the US,” he said. “There is so much anti-government, anti-tax, anti-media sentiment. People would run out with pitchforks and torches if you proposed such a thing.
“The BBC has a wonderful digital offering but they are not that focused on business. And, again, there is room for dozens and dozens of big organisations to exist in digital. [Taking] a tiny fraction of BBC’s readers, or anyone’s readers would be great for us. I’d be thrilled.”
When AOL paid $315m (£197m) for the Huffington Post in 2011, which was a similar size to Business Insider at the time of the sale, it was considered by some observers to be a pricey deal that would be unlikely to be repeated.
“People said that, but now on pretty much any measure you look at BuzzFeed would be worth way more than that,” Blodget said. “And Vice Media was just valued at $2.5bn – so that HuffPo number may end up looking quite small.”
Blodget added that tech startups have always been seen as sexy by investors, but it has taken a long time for the opportunity provided by digital media businesses to be realised.
“The development cycle of media brands and media companies is a different growth path than technology,” he said. “Importantly, you now have investors and traditional media companies realising digital media is very viable as an economic proposition and is only likely to become more so over the next 10, 20, 30 years as the digital [generations] mature. Not all digital publications swill succeed, not by a long shot, but some will and they will ultimately be worth quite a bit.”
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