Business Insider's Traffic Victory

Kevin Ryan shares how Business Insider grew from a small operation to surpassing the Wall Street Journal in traffic.

"The things we did are so obvious and done today, but we were early. We were updating things continually, writing stories that were not complete. If we heard a rumor that X company was buying Y company, we'd say that's what we're hearing. What happens when you write that? Someone from that company calls and says 'actually it's true.' Then you get more information and write 4-5 stories during the day as you get more details.

We did a great job making sure we showed up in search results. Everyone does that today, but at the time no one cared about headlines. If you had BusinessWeek magazine, the headline didn't result in more revenue. We would A/B test 3 headlines very quickly on a story and realize what was working.

What I'm proudest of is that Business Insider is at 300 million uniques today and never spent $1 in advertising. By 2015 we had 7 people covering military and defense - that's deep coverage. In the beginning we had 5 journalists covering the whole world, it wasn't amazing, but the product got better over time. We started winning awards.

When we sold, we were doing $40 million in revenue and sold for 11 times revenues, which is a big number for media properties."