Four hundred financial blogs. Who knew there were so many? Perhaps they have come of age now, at least as commercial entities. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Forbes Inc., was set to announce Monday that it will start selling ads this spring for about 400 financial blogs."
It is an open question as to whether Forbes can make money. Some of the larger blogs in the network are still tiny. Take Xconomy, one of the blogs Forbes is pitching. According to measurement service Compete, only a little over 18,000 people visited the site last month. Another site in the network, Talking Biz News, is too small to be measured by Compete or Alexa, another audience measurement firm.
If Forbes can pull together 400 sites with 5,000 visitors a month, however, it can have a network with two million visitors. And that's a lot.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-24-2008 @ 1:06PM
tim said...
LOL, yeah 99% of those blogs get less than 500 visitors/day...I took a look at what they were offering and decided against...for now.
Tim
http://www.timothysykes.com
3-24-2008 @ 3:53PM
swoit said...
Xconomy has over 35,000 unique visitors per month, so Compete is off by a factor of 2 on their traffic statistics.
More importantly, a site like Xconomy has a very focused audience, and Forbes is smart to aggregate the hundreds of financial and business blogs with highly targeted audiences, into their new blog network for advertisers.
3-24-2008 @ 3:33PM
douglas mcintyre said...
What is the source of your information?
Doug McIntyre
3-25-2008 @ 9:39AM
Vicky Bahl said...
I think blogs would also get increased visibility through these tie-ups. The number of unique visitor's don't matter as we are talking about targeted ads and not general one's. At least the advertisers are sure that "finance guys" will read their ads on a financial blog. But as far as competing with giants such as Google, the ad networks should be considered as a separate channel and not a competitor.
4-09-2008 @ 6:35PM
Chris Roush said...
Doug,
You can look at the SiteMeter link on Talking Biz News and see that it is averaging more than 1,000 unique visitors per day for the last five months -- November through March.