There’s no question Business Insider has grown substantially since the last time Blodget opened up about his company’s performance: almost two years ago, he released some public numbers, and at that point the site — which was then about three years old — was pulling in 8 million unique visitors per month and had revenues of $5 million. The site even turned a minuscule profit in 2010, Blodget said, of about $2,000 (that’s not a typo).

In the latest update, the Business Insider founder says the site has boosted its traffic substantially, and now gets an average of 23 million unique visitors per month, or more than a million on the average day — growth that he says puts it ahead of giants such as Businessweek, Mashable and TechCrunch.

While that’s impressive, however, Blodget hasn’t provided us with some of the most important data a media company needs in order to prove its health: namely, revenue and/or profitability metrics. It’s probably safe to assume that revenues are higher than they were almost two years ago, or the site would have shut down by now — and they may even be dramatically higher, since pageviews and unique visitors are still popular measurements used by many advertisers to determine success.

But as Blodget himself notes in his presentation, the profitability of digital advertising has been plummeting over the past few years. The amount of advertising is still growing rapidly, and ad revenues are also increasing, but it’s a little like the Red Queen’s race in Alice in Wonderland: media companies are having to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place — every incremental pageview is worth less and less.

This is the same dilemma that almost every media entity is facing, from traditional players such as the New York Times to newer stars like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Some of the newer entrants like BuzzFeed — and even the more entrepreneurial of the old guard, such as The Atlantic and Forbes — are trying to use more “native” advertising formats such as sponsored posts and marketing-related content to combat this problem.

It’s not clear from Blodget’s presentation whether Business Insider is doing much of this, although he does say that social “is not the be-all and end-all” for digital news sites, and that the importance of social as a referrer of traffic is “grossly overstated.” And it isn’t clear what the site is doing instead of social or native advertising — which makes it almost impossible to say whether the company is financially healthy or not.

Huge pageview or readership numbers are nice to have, but they are not enough for a business in and of themselves (just ask Tumblr, which has 20 billion pageviews a month and yet is still facing questions about its business model) unless of course you are planning to flip your business to someone much larger who already has a business model. Business Insider is going to have to answer those kinds of questions somehow, whether Blodget wants to tell us the answers or not.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / TechCrunch

Neal was behind BW‘s Business Exchange, an expensive and intricate social net that cost the company some $25 million from launch through the Bloomberg acquisition. He also led McGraw-Hilll’s investment in LinkedIn (the investment stayed with the company when BW was sold.)

Neal’s resume includes exec positions at Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), AOL (NYSE: AOL) and eBay (NSDQ: EBAY), a varied background that should be useful in the new gig. Given the number of academic institutions and companies he has to deal with, a stint as chief cat herder might also have come in handy. More details in the release.

– Michael Bloomberg was keen on buying BusinessWeek, after Bloomberg News broke the story about BW hiring Evercore as its banker.

– Bloomberg execs explored buying BusinessWeek in late 2008, 6 months before McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) acknowledged the mag was for sale, but passed on it after the global economic crisis.

– Bloomberg name gets equal billing on the BW cover, a switch from the tiny font added to the title last December. Looks a bit like The Economist, which Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg’s chief content officer, is a big fan of.

– Double the number of stories per issue, but many articles written by Bloomberg’s fleet of 2,300 journalists. After the cuts, the mag was only left with three NY-based writers.

– Bloomberg has committed to a minimum 66 news pages each issue, up from about 55.

– The new mag has five sections: economics, companies, politics and policy, technology, and markets. The sections often contain re-edited Bloomberg stories.

– Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which has a weekly circulation of 900,000, plans to give away 200,000 copies, including from online requests for free sample issues.

– Bloomberg has cut BW‘s losses by a large extent, it says. Mainly through job cuts and office closures. The mag has fewer than 300 employees, down from about 400 in October.

Here is a teaser cover from this week’s BW.

– “They come to us with needs.” No, they don’t. Get over yourself.

– “The mission of our 1700 reporters around the globe is to curate that world for you, to tell you what’s important, to tell you why you need to know about it, and what action you need to be prepared to take to compete in the weed ahead.” 1700 reporters? OK, so now all Bloomberg reporters worldwide work for Josh? Sure they’re happy to hear this.

– “Our aim at Bloomberg BusinessWeek is to be your one-stop shop for business news.” Delusions of granduer in a distributed news world? That too in a weekly print magazine?

– “The most important new feature of the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek is that it is comprehensive…it is genuinely comprehesive.” Whoa, that’s deep.

– “All of them have a point of view; all of them answer the question: ‘why do I need to read this right now’.” Except it is a week old.

– “Our mission, when we say comprehensive, is really to serve the whole business person.” I am complete now.

Who’s ready for MoreClarity, MoreEnergy, MoreImpact? I am. Can’t wait to pick up the copy on Apr 23rd.

Roughly 100 staffers lost their jobs at BW a few days ahead of the official transfer of ownership from McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) to Bloomberg last November.

At the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit, which was still being held in the McGraw-Hill building, the registration area was adorned with four posters touting the mag’s relaunch, which arrives on newsstands on April 23. The tagline on one poster says in large, bold type: “Business Magazines Are Dead,” with “Oh, really?” in a smaller font below. Another one explains what’s to come by saying, “Fewer Pages, Fewer Stories, Fewer Issues — sounded like a lousy idea to us too.” Bloomberg execs have promised that the revamped BW will have shorter articles, but more pages for editorial and three more issues.

Staci adds: There’s never a good time for layoffs but Bloomberg picked a rotten one. This should have been a week for the brand to get a boost with the Media Summit. Instead, that was squandered within the community that covers Bloomberg — and may ripple beyond. That’s before we get to the quality issues of the cuts but aside from personal frustrations over some of the layoffs, that’s hard to gauge now.

At BBW, he’ll report to Daniel Doctoroff, president of Bloomberg L.P. effective Jan. 4. Bascobert will be responsible for strategy, revenue, and operations — translation: make it pay, grow global reach and increase market audience. He began at Dow Jones in early 2006 as SVP, operations for the consumer group and was promoted to this job in 2007. He started his work life as a systems engineer at GM. Release.

Bloomberg execs chose the people who would make the transition and that act alone is transforming — even though what it is becoming isn’t entirely clear to outsiders. Bloomberg is already dismantling the BW offices and moving the remaining staff into its own spaces. The new BW starts with lower overhead — and vastly different expectations. At McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP), it had an aura all its own. At Bloomberg, it will be the leading consumer brand and just one part of a very different constellation.

On the edit side, in a shift that shows some of the priorities, Maria Bartiromo, a leading light for cable biz news competitor CNBC, is being replaced as a columnist by Charlie Rose, whose show is on Bloomberg’s own network. Editor Josh Tyrangiel comes from Time Inc., where he worked with Norm Pearlstine, now Bloomberg’s chief content officer and the person responsible for making the acquisition work. Bloomberg already has committed to making BW a “true” weekly with 52 issues a year; hiring Tyrangiel reinforces that and shows a willingness to go outside both news organizations for editorial leadership. But Bloomberg execs have made it quite clear that Bloomberg News E-I-C Matt Winkler is firmly in charge of the editorial strategy; he told ContentSutra in a recent interview that the two have very little overlap but share journalistic values. They don’t share much in the way of style, though, and I have no doubt that Bloomberg’s style will prevail.

It’s Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek now.

The official take: McGraw Hill release | Bloomberg release

Updated: A very valid comment from our regular commenter Jenkins, which I think hasn’t been said enough among the pain of these layoffs at BW: “While we all have to feel for the personal stories, it is still the case that BusinessWeek is a failed entity. And it is also the case that their web strategy is going nowhere fast. So, let’s all be sad about the human side but let’s remember that these same people couldn’t compete on the big stage, which is ultimately why they failed.”

The memo from Byrne, sent out earlier today, after the jump:

——————————————————
Friends & Colleagues:

After spending 22 years of my professional life at BusinessWeek, I