Here's to Business Insider's October surprises

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This month marks the one-year anniversary of Business Insider becoming part of the Axel Springer family. It's been a great year, capped off by a series of new records and other accomplishments which we are highlighting below.

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As the newsroom knows since it's a frequent Henry Blodget directive, its mission should never be for Business Insider to be the biggest business news source. It's to be the best - to our readers.

We want to consistently produce exciting journalism that attracts readers and viewers. The thinking is simple: if we can create stories that really inform, surprise, provoke, and illuminate, the audience will follow. And grow.

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To illustrate this, here are some stories from last month that both performed well (many readers, viewers, and shares) and made an impact:

All this great storytelling yielded results. BI US last month experienced its highest traffic ever: 82 million unique visitors, per Google Analytics. (This traditional audience barometer complements our recent calculation about our reach across all platforms.) Across all Business Insider international sites and INSIDER, our lifestyle property, we reached 113 million UVs, also a record.

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global BI audience

Business Insider/Google Analytics

Business Insider Inc. global audience growth, 2013-2016

Video views, an increasingly important metric of our success, also hit a new record: 2.2 billion across all sites and platforms.

Stories like the above also tend to get shared. As a result, our engagement with readers and viewers continues to also grow. Last month:

  • Business Insider brands had more than 44 million Facebook followers and received more than 30 million likes, comments, and shares;
  • Business Insider's LINE following grew 34% in October, to nearly half a million users in just two months;
  • Business Insider posted a video about an amazing smart crib that got 19 million views on Facebook and was shared 255,000 times;
  • All Business Insider properties, including INSIDER, had 2.2 billion video views across all platforms.

While we're proud of the success of our newsroom and social team, Business Insider as a company continues to fire on all cylinders.

We're evaluating early results from our subscription and adblock test, which so far look promising; our UK site just turned 2, and we will soon be announcing more international sites; and our e-commerce team is ramping up for what they expect will be their biggest holiday season yet.

On the business side, BI Studios continues to roll out beautifully executed digital storytelling, including this Cartier page on the history of the brand's NYC "Mansion" headquarters. Also, our SVP of Sales, Sheila Buckley, was one of only three recipients of the prestigious ad:Tech Industry Achievement Award.

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Lastly, with IGNITION, our highly anticipated yearly conference, around the corner, the team has locked a stellar team of speakers, including: Randall L. Stephenson, Chairman & CEO of AT&T; Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Airbnb; Jeff Bewkes, Chairman and CEO of Time Warner Inc.; Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global; James Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox; Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of WPP; Barry Diller, Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC and Expedia, Inc.; and Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, Co-founders of WeWork.

Thanks to the entire team for making all this possible. We look forward to ending the year on a strong note.