Business Insider began as a blog about Manhattan's tech scene
Business Insider started in 2007 as Silicon Alley Insider, a single blog about New York's tech scene. Within eight years a German publisher paid $343 million for most of it. Along the way it won a Pulitzer, drew steady criticism for clickbait, and by 2025 had cut nearly 40 per cent of its staff while going all-in on AI.
The founders were Kevin P. Ryan, formerly chief executive of DoubleClick, Dwight Merriman and Henry Blodget. Their site stitched together niche blogs, starting with Silicon Alley Insider in May 2007 and the finance blog Clusterstock in March 2008, and mixed original reporting with aggregation of other outlets' stories. Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz invested early, and Jeff Bezos's investment firm held about 3 per cent by the time of the sale. Profit arrived in the final quarter of 2010, when the company had only a few dozen full-time staff and aimed at investors and finance professionals.
Growth was quick. By June 2012 the site drew 5.4 million unique visitors, and in 2014 The New York Times judged its traffic comparable to the Wall Street Journal's. Axel Springer bought 88 per cent of the parent company in 2015, a deal valuing it at $442 million. New ventures followed: a Tech Insider site with 40 staff, a shopping guide that became Insider Reviews, and in 2017 a paywalled subscription called BI Prime. From 2021 to 2023 the brand called itself simply Insider while chasing general news and lifestyle readers.
Its methods drew fire. It allowed anonymous sources for any reason, gave the software company SAP limited editorial control over one sponsored section, and ran native advertising. In 2010 it falsely reported that New York's governor was about to resign, having earlier wrongly said Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. After the Springer takeover, departing staff complained that traffic outranked serious reporting. Still, in 2022 it won its first Pulitzer, for illustrated reporting told as a series of comics.
Recent years brought upheaval. Layoffs of 10 per cent in April 2023, about 8 per cent in 2024 and 21 per cent in May 2025 accompanied a turn toward artificial intelligence tools, with more than 70 per cent of employees using an enterprise chatbot. In 2025 it also removed articles by a supposed freelancer after an editor concluded they had been machine-written.
Source: Business Insider
