European Financial Sites Making Money off Financial Crisis

comScore has just published a report proving once again that while the world is suffering the financial crisis, the owners of various financial sites are doing more than well in terms of visitors (and possibly revenue as well). We have already spoken about money-related websites surviving the recession pretty well and today comScore provides additional statistics from Europe to prove the same point.

The web measurement company quotes demand for immediate information as the main reason for people to choose websites for their financial news instead of other mediums that either take too long to be delivered (newspapers) or choose when they will deliver the information to you themselves (TV). At the same time online alternatives provide information in a much speedier manner and on demand as well - which is obviously important when you are very much concerned about some issue. This major advantage ensured incredible growth for money-related websites in Europe in September.

As a result of this trend the overall category of financial news and research sites grew by 10% in the UK and by 9% in France in September compared to the previous month. What’s more, some of the websites belonging to the category demonstrated impressive growth of over 100%. Only in Germany financial sites grew slower - by only 3% versus August.

The fastest growth rates were demonstrated in the UK by Guardian Business (141%), Sky Money (122%), CNN Money (133$), and in France by Boursier.com (107%), Lexpansion.com (97%), Capital Magazin (96%), and Lemoneymag.fr (90%). Even in Germany with its slower overall growth rate there were websites that increased their visitors by over 30%: Manager-Magazin.de (39%), AOL Money & Finance (35%), Finanztreff.de (34%).

Of course the most interesting thing here is that while the world is falling apart, people are losing their jobs and stock prices are sinking everywhere, the financial sites are more than healthy when it comes to the number of people visiting them. Besides, usually the number of people and the volume of the pageviews they generate transform into advertising income as there are little (if any) professional websites living without advertising to support their content (at least among those tracked by comScore). And of course the more pageviews, the better for the publisher in terms of money earned.

So my point is that owners of financial sites are best positioned to survive the recession as visitors flood their online properties looking for immediate news in the fields they are mostly concerned about - money, unemployment, markets, etc. So while people everywhere are losing their money, financial sites will do much better than everyone else even if the money spent on advertising is cut simply because the decline in advertising rates will most certainly be compensated pretty well by the incredible traffic growth.