Henry Blodget, the global editor in chief and CEO at Business Insider, is making the leap into market-driven business news TV. The Bottom Line, which Blodget will host, will stream on the wildly popular publication’s social media platforms.
“We’ve learned from both our shorter-form and some longer-form documentary work we’ve produced over the past five years,” Blodget told Adweek. “It’s clear that executives and investors want convenient and mobile programming.”
The Bottom Line is sponsored by Fidelity and debuts today at 2 p.m. ET. The 15- to 20-minute business news show will stream weekly on Business Insider’s and Markets Insider’s Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, reaching a combined 9 million followers.
Fidelity’s yearlong partnership (a total of 36 shows) includes a mention of the financial services firm at the beginning of each show and as a preroll of short-form, on-demand clips that come out of the show.
“Few people have the time to turn on a device at a specific time to settle in for some programming,” Blodget said. “We’ve built this show to ultimately break it up into individual stories to then distribute on our social platforms.”
The competition for this kind of show is fierce, from cable stalwart CNBC to the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Live to digital player Cheddar TV, which streams for up to eight hours a day on Twitter.
The Bottom Line, Blodget said, is different. For one thing, the average age of his audience is 35. That’s 10 years younger than other business-focused publications. He calls it a “large, millennial, executive audience.”
“The growth of social platforms has created huge opportunities for video distribution,” he said, “but everyone made mistakes early on assuming we could make any kind of video, and people would watch it.”
While Business Insider’s video team and overall revenue have both been growing, according to Blodget, he’s not bearish when it comes to the future of the written word.
“To do well going forward, we have to embrace all types of storytelling,” he said.
