AOL Money & Finance Surpasses Yahoo Finance, MSN Money For Top Portal Spot
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AOL released a much needed improvement to its Finance site last November at beta.finance.aol.com. At the time, the site was the third largest money and finance site after Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.
December Comscore data is now available, and it shows a steep rise in traffic for AOL Finance. They’ve passed both Yahoo and Microsoft to take the top spot in terms of unique visitors. AOL rose from 12.2 million unique visitors in November to 13.5 million in December, a 10% increase. Meanwhile Yahoo dipped from 13.7 to 13.2 million unique visitors, and MSN Money dipped from 11.6 to 11 million visitors. The combined decrease in Yahoo’s and MSN’s audiences is almost equal to the gains by made by AOL.
AOL Finance also saw 335 million page views, slightly more than second place Yahoo Finance with 333 million. This is actually a slight drop from November, although that may be a good thing, too. Many of the changes allow users to get updated information without page refreshes, so page views are more efficient and users are happier.
If you are a heavy user of any of the major finance sites, let us know which one you think is best. But AOL seems to have made the right changes in their new beta. It will replace the existing site in the next six weeks or so.
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This article has 16 comments:
Guy
Meanwhile, AOL overall continues to lose traffic, as you can see from this Compete chart:
siteanalytics.compete....
So it would be surprising if AOL Finance was taking share with no new design and AOL overall losing traffic.
I'd rather read Bloomberg via AOL than TheStreet.com and Motley Fool via Yahoo Finance any day.
Jackson
Also, it means they'll have access to our conference call transcripts, a critical resource for investors. We haven't announced this yet, but we're expanding our transcript coverage to about 2,500 companies this quarter. Think of that as 3x the S&P 500.
Jackson
Contributors' articles:
beta.finance.aol.com/q...
and
Transcript:
beta.finance.aol.com/q...
But the problem is that the "All" headlines box is full of so many headlines that most of them aren't important. Sure, you get to see what every trade pub has written about the company recently, but most of that isn't news that's important enough to impact the stock.
In other words, it does a good job of showing me everything I need to research to understand a stock, but doesn't help me understand what's important.
Just my 2c.
Notwithstanding the weird Comscore data, the key question is whether any of the competitors can de-throne Yahoo Finance. Google was probably shocked at the lack of market share it gained with its finance product. Probably because people just can't be bothered to move their portfolios, however easy you make it for them.
BTW, does anyone have more reliable traffic data than Comscore?
I have said this too many times, but analysts just don't get why Google is able to monopolize the internet. Its the super-computer, stupid. ( server farms/ dark fiber etc )
Google finance is not even out of beta, which simply means that they are refining and experimenting with their technology until they have something that is good enough for them.
When google finance comes out of beta it will be so integrated with googles other "free services" ( eyeball catchers ) that it will make your head spin. Look at how much it has changed already.
What/Who is stopping them ?
Guy
But despite being given all that traffic, the Bloggingstocks traffic numbers are horrible -- look at this chart:
siteanalytics.compete....
Guy
Marketwatch is merger of serveral finanical websites, it provides its own, Financial News, Charts, Quotes, financial commentarty (which is often conservative and very replublican), Message Boards, blogs, newsletters for stock, options, futures traders, and educational trading website. It is ridiculous, for Marketwatch to send visiters to other finacial portals, when they are offering everything themselves.
Guy
How do you explain the decline in Bloggingstocks' traffic given the exposure it gets from AOL?