AOL Money & Finance Surpasses Yahoo Finance, MSN Money For Top Portal Spot

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.

Click to enlarge:

Comments

[Long-ShortGuy]

It's not clear what to make of the Comscore numbers. AOL Finance hasn't yet rolled out the beta site as the default, so it's hard to accept that the increase in the Comscore numbers is because of the new design.

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.

[Lisa]

This is a smart move on AOL's part -- it's used its Relegence acquisition to link out to thousands of news sources, such as Bloomberg. Presumably this is like Google Finance, ie. they're not taking payment for traffic. (Relegence never demanded payment for traffic, I think.) As a result, AOL now has better news sources than Yahoo Finance.

I'd rather read Bloomberg via AOL than TheStreet.com and Motley Fool via Yahoo Finance any day.

[Frank Li]

This is a huge improvement. Until now, for example, AOL's blog content was dominated by Bloggingstocks, it's own paid team of bloggers. Now it includes headlines from other blogs. Not clear what this will mean for Bloggingstocks -- since they won't be sending traffic to it, maybe they'll shut it down.

[DavidJackson]

It's great to see Seeking Alpha headlines in the AOL Finance beta -- it means that our contributors' articles will now be available to AOL readers.

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.

[DavidJackson]

Here's a couple of examples of our stuff on the new AOL Finance beta (under "Headlines", check the "All" tab and the "Blogs" tab):

Contributors' articles:
beta.finance.aol.com/q...

and
Transcript:
beta.finance.aol.com/q...

[Phil G.]

I still think Yahoo Finance is best - and I don't know who is going to AOL anymore.

[Frank Li]

Spent more time on the AOL Finance beta. The range of sources is outstanding -- really interesting stuff from trade publications, for example. And they have every news source that Yahoo Finance has, plus a ton more.

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.

[Lisa]

The new AOL Finance is an interesting cross between Google Finance and Yahoo Finance. Google Finance tries to keep everything on one page, whereas Yahoo Finance uses a left-hand navigation bar to provide access to multiple pages. This looks like a hybrid.

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?

[seriously ?]

I can't even begin to talk about how technologically superior Google is and how powerful and fast they can and will make google finance.

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 ?

[nitadmin]

The new AOL Finance is still Beta. The reason for its increased traffic is because of AOL popular blog, bloggingstocks.com. This blog is extremely popular and the number visitiers are increasing every day. It even has a mobile site which can accessed using smartphones, m.bloggingstocks.com.

[nitadmin]

Yahoo Finance is still a better site. The new AOL Finance does not allow you to check a stocks option chain. Yahoo Finance does.

[forest]

Lisa was spot on about the linking to Bloomberg, etc being the real reason for the jump. Yahoo Finance is still king in usability (have you looked at how cluttered the AOL quote pages are?). As far as Google goes, I don't think they have rolled out enough features to justify the hype. I just don't get what they are trying to do, they are usually good at topping competitor offerings with better features (ex: gmail) but their finance site isn't that much different from Yahoo's.

[Long-ShortGuy]

nitadmin, Bloggingstocks can't be what's driving AOL Finance's growth. Bloggingstocks seems to have cut a deal with Marketwatch which must be generating a lot of traffic (I frequently see it on the front page of MarketWatch), and it's also heavily featured on AOL Finance. Between the two, MarketWatch and AOL probably account for most of Bloggingstocks' traffic.

But despite being given all that traffic, the Bloggingstocks traffic numbers are horrible -- look at this chart:
siteanalytics.compete....

[Long-ShortGuy]

nitadmin, one other thing: even if its numbers were good (which they're not), bloggingstocks does not have its traffic counted under the AOL Finance domain.

[nitadmin]

I have not seen links from Marketwatch to Bloggingstocks. Furthermore, it does not make sense. Bloggingstocks belongs to AOL, Which belongs to Time Warner. A moderate-liberal company. Where as Marketwatch belongs to Dow Jones, which belongs to News Corp, a very conservitive replublican company. Alcohol and water do not mix. And neither does News Corp and Time Warner.

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.

[Long-ShortGuy]

nitadmin -- you're right, my bad. Marketwatch is linking out to 24/7 wall street, which is similar in tone and style to blogging stocks (they even share some of the same authors).

How do you explain the decline in Bloggingstocks' traffic given the exposure it gets from AOL?