Most Popular Financial Websites and Blogs

My buddy Eric Jackson has compiled some interesting statistics for a story he wrote in Forbes on the most popular business web sites (via traffic scores), and blogs.  Full story here, but the takeaway is those sites putting up full or partial pay walls are being hurt (no surprise), while those which are free are doing good to ok.  Yahoo Finance - which I frankly think looks almost the same as it did a decade ago - remains the giant, and is certainly the site I go to the most as well.

Later in the piece he looks at the blogosphere and the story there is actually quite ugly - a lot of degradation in audience, aside from Zerohedge.  True story - I had no idea who "Tyler Durden" was back in the day as I never saw Fight Club, but I was an early reader of this little site called Zerohedge.  Back when I had more traffic than he did - but we were both relatively small weights, I asked "Tyler" to do a story exchange with me to help cross pollinate both sites with new readers.  That was February 2009 ... the rest is history hahah.

1. Here is a link to my guest ppst on Zerohedge 
2. Here is a link to Zerohedge's guest post on FMMF

So yes, I take full credit for the ZeroHedge success story. ;)

As an aside I did some cleaning up of my blogroll two weekends ago and was shocked at how many blogs from 3-4 years ago have simply disappeared.  It is not as easy as it looks to keep up the pace over many years, and the only reason I have pushed through is I have an ultimate goal other than being a blog writer.

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Anyhow here are the main stats from the story from Eric.  I probably visit all these sites often during the week but part of that is because I am always looking for story ideas to bring to the audience of FMMF.   For personal use I am mostly a Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, and Realmoney.com (up until the new redesign a few weeks ago, which I dislike tremendously) guy.

Below you’ll find the top sites by unique visitors in August

1. Yahoo! Finance – 30 mm uniques, up 21% Y/Y
2. New York Times (the whole paper – not just the Business section – although Dealbook.nytimes.com had 446k uniques) – 15 mm uniques, down 9% Y/Y
3. CNN Money – 11 mm uniques, up 16% Y/Y
4. Forbes – 10 mm uniques, up 17% Y/Y
5. Wall Street Journal – 7.5 mm uniques, down 22% Y/Y
6. Bloomberg – 6 mm uniques, up 10% Y/Y
7. Reuters – 5.5 mm uniques, up 2.6% Y/Y
8. CNBC – 4.3 mm uniques, up 41% Y/Y
9. BusinessWeek.com – 3.6 mm uniques, down 9%
10. MarketWatch – 3.6 mm uniques, down 13% Y/
11. Business Insider – 2.8 mm uniques, up 18% Y/Y
12. FT.com – 2.5 mm uniques, down 6% Y/Y
13. TheStreet.com (free) – 2.5 mm uniques, up 1% Y/Y

Now onto the blogs, which are mostly sinking - I excluded the 'tech' blogs which Eric included to focus only on financial sites.  Both August 2010 and 2011 were times of turmoil so I am a bit shocked at how much of a dramatic drop some of these sites have had.  Barry's site - The Big Picture (ritholtz.com) was really the grandfather of all financial blogging sites.

1. Zerohedge.com – 577k uniques, up 42% Y/Y
2. Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com – 230k uniques, down 21% Y/Y
3. Ritholz.com – 172k uniques, down 22% Y/Y
4. Nakedcapitalism.com – 80k uniques, down 18% Y/Y
5. Globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com – 80k, down 43% Y/Y
6. Calculatedriskblog.com – 57k uniques, down 63% Y/Y
7. Baselinescenario.com – 18k uniques, down 72% Y/Y
8. Paul.kedrosky.com – 11k uniques, down 77% Y/Y