Analyst Responds to BusinessWeek.com Editor Byrne

Earlier, we published a response from BusinessWeek.com Editor in Chief John Byrne disputing a thesis put forth by analyst Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall St: that BusinessWeek.com's traffic was startlingly weak and that this was the result of the site's stale, print-like content.  (Our own analyst Peter Kafka had argued that the traffic numbers McIntyre cited looked wrong and that, in any case, BusinessWeek's problem was distribution, not content.)  Below, 24/7 Wall St analyst McIntyre concedes that BusinessWeek's internal numbers may be right but stands by his original conclusion:

While it may be that BusinessWeek's internal number say otherwise, the NetRatings and comScore numbers are fairly similar. And, in NetRatings, BusinessWeek has a "time per month on the site" of 4.15 minutes. That is below the time for Forbes, WSJ, Reuters, Bloomberg, TheStreet, The Fool, and Smart Money. It is well behind the figures for the financial sections of the big three web portals.

Looking at the financial sites in Alexa measurements, BusinessWeek ranks behind Forbes, Reuters, WSJ.com, MarketWatch, Reuters, and Bloomberg. The portals do not have separate numbers for their financial sections in Alexa. BusinessWeek also lags all of its rivals in Quantcast and Compete. In Compete's survey, BusinessWeek is the only financial site of any size that lost audience over the last year.

While Mr. Byrne's numbers may be right, all of the external sources show that BusinessWeek runs behind the leaders in the financial website sector. Peter Kafka thinks this is because BW does not have as many links at portals as its competition. At 24/7 Wall St., we think the problem is content.