A minor detour – snapshot of the financial blogosphere
Posted on 07 October 2010
For those suffering from QE2 fatigue, the following might numb the pain a little.
We have been investigating visitor behavior patterns at various financial websites recently. Out of this has fallen the following snapshot of the blogosphere (broadly defined and with the following data drawn exclusively from Google Trends). It’s not meant to be exhaustive – more a quick diversion.
Newscorp’s got the moves
Apologies for the useless scaling – send your optician’s bills to Google. Given that the WSJ Digital Network includes MarketWatch (3.5m uniques per month), Bloomberg (5.6m) and the Journal (7.5m), Newscorp’s got it’s paws all over the big end of town. It’s interesting that the Journal has outperformed Bloomberg by visitors (different business models but suggests that the Journal is having some success despite its paywall). CNNMoney (5.6M) is slipping quietly behind. FT.com (3.8m) is included as a point of reference. Sure the UK doesn’t have the population of the US, but the pink sheet is making slow progress. It’d be remiss not to mention YahooFinance with 5.0m daily uniques or 31m unique visitors per month – doing just fine thanks.
The understudies and the contenders
It’s the Western conference versus the East, and the Business Insider is looking the goods over Seeking Alpha. Perhaps the self-help, cult of the amateur model is struggling with the sheer volume of content. Expert curation has its merits in an information laden environment. The more traditional journalism of The Street even looks to be pulling away.
While looking to the next layer of aggregated content providers, Zerohedge is the clear winner. Its smoky blend of conspiracy theory, expert insights and outright inflammatory rhetoric make for entertaining reading and an engaged audience. In contrast, the likes of Financial Sense and Minyanville seem to be struggling under the own weight. (Note that Abnormal Returns has managed to extricate itself from the Google web.)
The Blogs
Even the most charismatic of bloggers strain to make an impression on the Google worm-o-meter. Barry Ritholtz has forged a path that few can follow. On a check of other high profile bloggers, there looks to be a trend towards a gradual decline in audience (the purple line is Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis). Some of my favourite sites barely register (The Pragmatic Capitalist, A Fistful of Euros, and Credit Writedowns to name a few). So much for emergent democracy.
Raw data and lines
Let’s hope then that the vanguard of open source data – including Google and Yahoo – continue to make it freely available. This is a growth sector so there is reasonable odds that the likes of Finviz and FXStreet achieve the scale required to maintain independence while still being able to evolve their offerings. Still with role models like the LME out there, it’d be fair to expect some media mogul to seek to patent the human genome at some point. Until then vive le revolution.
And the Chartists
No, not the 19th century revolutionaries – these are the descendants of the Delphic Oracles or perhaps the forerunners of the second Foundation.
It speaks volumes for the dark arts that a site like Elliot Wave International can grow its following even as the ‘timing’ of some of its calls has proven rather wayward. Perhaps the descent of The Slope of Hope (a great site by my reckoning) is indicative of the same malaise that is striking at other blog sites – simply a declining interest in the financial markets. One final curiosity – dhsort’s Great Depression analogues burned bright but you can only have so much of a good thing I s’pose.
4 responses to A minor detour – snapshot of the financial blogosphere
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Bill Luby, Tadas Viskanta and Mebane Faber, Mebane Faber. Mebane Faber said: financial blogosphere http://bit.ly/9v0PHj [...]
[...] interesting overview of the financial blogosphere via data diary. They break the online money universe into 6 (5 really) tiers: 1. Major Media WSJ, Bloomberg, FT [...]
Clearly, there has been a paradigm shift away from info bottlenecks controlled by old line brokerage firms and cloistered academe to free and open access to financial data.
By my count there are some 57M individuals investing online, looking for love and not all in the wrong places.
One of those places, YCharts.com, a new contender, around less than a year, has been making great strides adding to its already unique offerings to this market.
Specializing in classic fundamentals, Ycharts current free site gives users all they ever wanted to know, not just about the last period’s financials, but goes back generally ten (10) years on every exchange listed stock. It presents the data graphically or in tabular form and will even run comparison charts on several stocks in any of some 40 different fundamental data points.
It’s worth a look if only to use its embed service on your own blog.
Good trading.
Thanks for the tip.