Editor’s Note: The board of directors of the Dodo has responded to this article, disputing the author’s characterizations of its business strategy, spending rate, staff morale, as well as the timeliness of the story, which addresses many issues that were contained to the Dodo’s first year of operation, in 2014. Its full response can be found below.
It’s nice to have a job in an economy where not everyone does, and in a field—journalism—where the economic prospects are uncertain. Many publishers are looking with concern at a world where Facebook and Apple are using their power to steer readers to proprietary platforms, as innovations in ad blocking threaten the whole existing business model, which was already sort of provisional. Then again, Re/Code reported this morning that Axel Springer, the publisher of Bild and Die Welt, is going to buy the website Business Insider in a deal that “values Business Insider at $442 million.”
The super-devoted fans of pop music—your Beliebers, your Directioners—are insane, and love to be insane. But this, well, this is something: Milo Yiannopoulos, a columnist for Business Insider, spent $1,200 on a plane ticket in order to fly to Germany from London and buy Mariah Carey's new album today.
Oh internet! Oh glorious fountain of lies and truth, oh tangled network of trolls and heroes, oh noxious abyss of Photoshopped Harry Styles photos. You are so wonderful yet so full of shit.
Yesterday, Business Insider chief correspondent Nicholas Carlson stuck a subtle shiv into his competitors at Buzzfeed, attributing the site's success in exploiting Facebook's ever-evolving newsfeed algorithm to its practice of buying traffic in the form of Facebook ads—as opposed to, you know, attracting readers. Then he took it out. Without telling anyone.
Jeff Bezos, Time magazine man of the year 1999, has invested $5 million in the news and slideshow website Business Insider. Bezos' net worth is something like $25 billion, so in real-people money, $5 million to Jeff Bezos is... about 15 bucks. But it's a lot to BI, which has raised around $13 millon so far, and will "do eleven million dollars in revenues this year," according to a New Yorker article from this week. Update!: Bezos is not, actually, investing a whole $5 million; rather, $5 million is the total sum that Business Insider just raised, between an unspecified investment from Bezos and money from previous investors chipping in again.
Henry Blodget, a full grown adult who's held a highly compensated job in finance and founded a multimillion-dollar media company, still retains his ability to be astounded by the little things in life. Like airplanes: what is it like to ride in one? Or women: are they too lazy to get good jobs? Or Jews: why do people hate them so much? Today, Henry Blodget, who has retained the wonderful ability to see the world through a child's eyes (which so many of his cynical peers have lost), has found something outside of his hotel room door. But what??
If there is one national mystery we have not yet gotten to the bottom of yet, it is planes: What's up with them? They're so large, and yet they fly. It's a shady business. But Business Insider's Henry Blodget, the internet's greatest troll-savant and self-taught expert in anti-Semitism, has been on a few of them (specifically, two) lately, and he knows some things about planes.
You may remember Business Insider Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget from the time he cut-and-pasted an entire New York magazine article onto his website, or when he boldly published an inquisitive piece called, "Why Do People Hate Jews?" Today, more of the same from the man Bloomberg TV once dubbed King of the Bloggers.
One basic characteristic of journalism is this: its content is not bought and paid for and directed by an advertiser. It might be vapid. It might be poorly written. It might be damn near worthless. But it's not an advertisement.
All Business Insider CEO/editor-in-chief Henry Blodget wanted to do was walk into the Apple Store and pick up a new iPhone 4S, as is his birthright as a rich, white American. But when he got there, his quest was stymied by a horde of "Asian folks" "scarfing up" all the iPhones!
