Overcoming the inertia that keeps people going to other financial sites confronts Chris Jolley, group manager at Microsoft’s Financial Products Group, every day. He believe MSN Money deserves a look.
After spending some time paging through parts of MSN Money while chatting with Jolley, we can see his point. The site does have some nice data integration from the sources that someone researching financial info would turn to individually.
The consumer focus of MSN Money probably made it easier for investors to keep heading to the site that dominates the online world of financial information. Yahoo Finance has been planted atop that list for quite some time.
MSN Money has its appeals, and Jolley wanted to bring them to our attention (and to yours by proxy, of course.) He started off by citing unique content, written by folks like Jim Jubak.
A couple of gems reside in the MSN Money list of Investment Tools. The Stock Research Wizard pulls information from Zacks Investment Research, comScore, and Reuters to build a profile of a company and its stock.
Stock history, price targets, and catalysts preceded an interesting comparison feature. Visitors can quickly bring up a comparison of a stock and two others. Stacked against each other, people see how the stocks compare in estimates to gain, shares priced cheapest relative to earnings, and other factors.
Exchange-traded funds have been around for a few years, and have gained a section on MSN Money. On the research page about them, visitors can easily see the winners and losers, and how various asset classes have been performing.
Jolley told us multimedia, as in videos, will be one of the ways Microsoft has in mind to bolster the site and gain against Yahoo Finance. These likely have space selected for them on the MSN Money homepage as well as other pages throughout the site.
MSN Money doesn’t go for the muted colors like the Wall Street Journal or even Yahoo Finance use. That could be part of the public perception, but MSN Money enjoys significant traffic now. They need to get more to overcome Yahoo and stave off the challenge of AOL Finance and other sites.
Here is analysis from Hitwise for US visits to Business & Finance sites for the week ending 12/15/2007:
Source: Hitwise Rank Name Domain Market Share 1 Yahoo! Finance finance.yahoo.com 34.63% 2 MSN Money moneycentral.msn.com 11.28% 3 Market Watch www.marketwatch.com 3.31% 4 CNN Money money.cnn.com 2.91% 5 Reuters www.reuters.com 2.41% 6 Internal Revenue Service www.irs.gov 2.36% 7 AOL Money & Finance money.aol.com 2.34% 8 TheStreet.com www.thestreet.com 2.22% 9 DexKnows.com www.dexknows.com 2.13% 10 The Motley Fool www.fool.com 2.10%
