Business Insider Turns A $2,127 Profit On $4.8 Million In Revenue

The Business Insider is now profitable—just barely. In a post this morning reporting the digital media startup’s revenues, operating profits, and other metrics, Henry Blodget reveals that his collection of bloggy news sites and budding conferences eked out a net profit of $2,127, on revenues of $4.8 million last year. It’s about enough, Blodget notes, for a MacBook Pro.

But that’s actually quite an achievement for a media startup. Remember, the Business Insider was founded only in 2007, and this achieved profitability in its third year of operations. And as you can see by the chart above, its really the revenues that you want to keep an eye on. To put that $4.8 million in perspective, that’s roughly half of TechCrunch’s 2010 revenues of $10 million. Not bad. Most of last year, the Business Insider was pulling in about $1 million a quarter, which then almost doubled in the fourth quarter (I’m guess that bump came from its big conference).

Some other stats to chew on: The Business Insider now has 45 full time employees, and according to its internal numbers is attracting a 7.8 million unique visitors a month across its properties (which include Silicon Alley Insider, The Wire, and Clusterstock). ComScore has Business Insider at 4.6 million worldwide unique visitors in January, but also shows the same growth trend. SAI is now “less than half the total,” Blodget tells me. It looks like growth really took off in the past six months.

See, building a digital media business is possible. We need more, not less. Who’s next?