Kedrosky has a fascinating list of the most popular business websites in
the US. Yahoo Finance is tops in both visitors and time per visitor, with a
unique audience of almost 17 million, each of whom spends an average of more
than 23 minutes on the site. The Wall Street Journal comes in fourth, with a
healthy 8.5 million visitors and a time per visitor of 22 minutes – impressive,
considering that most of the site is behind a subscription firewall. I’m sure
that if it goes free it could become the number one site quite easily.
Interestingly, the atrociously-designed Bloomberg.com does well, with 3.5 million
visitors. Meanwhile, the biggest flop is surely FT.com, with a mere 1.8 million
visitors spending a bottom-of-the-league-table 3 minutes when they visit the
site. If the FT is genuine about its ambitions to become a global franchise,
the website has to do much better than this. Going free might not be sufficient,
but it certainly seems to be necessary at this point.