A Business Insider retrospective
After reading Ryan McCarthy's post at Reuters about Business Insider, I wanted to run some numbers. — After all, they've linked to nearly every significant article I've written for the last few years, often automatically by scraping Techmeme.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ryan McCarthy's post at Reuters has reopened the question of what Business Insider actually produces versus what it routes, and Marco Arment's retrospective puts numbers behind a grievance many writers share: BI has linked to nearly every significant article he has written for years, often automatically by scraping Techmeme. Felix Salmon's same-day pickup frames it as "over-aggregation" and a "mad grab for traffic," so this is now a three-outlet argument rather than one blogger's complaint.
The timing matters because of what came before: in March 2011 Henry Blodget disclosed that Business Insider turned its first operating profit — $2,127 on $4.8 million in revenue. That razor-thin margin is exactly why the aggregation question cuts deep: a business profitable only at the thinnest of margins has every incentive to keep its per-story costs near zero, and scraped links are the cheapest inventory there is.
First-order effects
- Business Insider faces an attribution problem in public: if its link flow to writers like Arment is machine-driven via Techmeme rather than editorial, its claim to be curating tech coverage weakens precisely as it markets itself on volume.
- Techmeme is confirmed as the de facto routing layer for tech news — its headline choices effectively decide which articles Business Insider surfaces, giving Gabe Rivera's site leverage it did not explicitly seek.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers watching Salmon's "over-aggregation" framing must decide whether scraped inbound links are free marketing or unpaid value extraction, which pressures sites like Business Insider to either add original reporting or accept being labeled aggregators.
- Writers with direct audiences — Arment built his through his own blog — gain bargaining power in the argument, since they can demonstrate they don't need the aggregator's traffic, undercutting the value proposition of link farms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tech news splits into two tiers: a small set of original reporters whose work everyone scrapes, and a larger set of aggregation-first sites competing on speed and volume at near-zero marginal cost — with the underlying economics only viable while ad rates tolerate thin pages.
- The episode positions human-edited aggregators like Techmeme as gatekeeping infrastructure whose editorial choices carry industry-wide pricing power over attention, a role regulators and publishers have historically contested when it concentrates.
The trend: Digital news economics are consolidating around an aggregation layer — Techmeme-style curation feeding high-volume, low-margin publishers — forcing an industry reckoning over who captures the value of a link.