We don’t even have any hopes of any formal guidance and we’d only expect a partial report on all the properties that Murdoch & Co. want to keep or get rid of.  How would you like the job of calculating all those numbers from all the units?

As this will be very difficult to interpret, we’d look at Reuters (NASDAQ: RTRSY) and Thomson (NYSE: TOC) if there is a big price change in News Corp.’s stock as those companies are also in a game changing merger that will make each one hard to evaluate.

NEWS CORP’s 52-week trading range is $17.84 to $25.78, so Friday’s near-3% gain to $19.41 leaves plenty of room for this stock to trade in either direction.

Jon C. Ogg
February 2, 2008

In November 2006, Yahoo! Finance had 406 million pageviews. AOL Finance had 239 million and MSN Money 155 million. Last month, the Yahoo! figure was 344 million followed by AOL at 338 million and MSN at 151 million. Not exactly the kinds of numbers Yahoo! wants to post.

In the tier of financial websites below the three portals, Dow Jones (DJ) sites had 95 million pageviews, down slightly from November of last year. Forbes had a big drop from 84 million pageviews last November to 56 million last month. CNN Money was fairly flat at 55 million pageviews. BusinessWeek has 21 million pageviews, up slightly. But the site still trails its rivals by a wide margin.

The Street.com (TSCM) dropped modestly year-over-year to 20 million pageviews. Reuters (RTRSY) rose slightly to 29 million pageviews. And, Bloomberg.com almost tripled to 29 million pageviews.

Yahoo! Finance has some work to do.

For a chart, click through to the next page and then enlarge.

Douglas A. McIntyre

The FTSE fell .1% to 6,546. Prudential (PUK) rose 2.7% to 716. Reuters (RTRSY) fell 1.1% to 588.

The DAXX rose .3% to 8,017. Commerzbank rose 2.3% to 28.14. Siemens (SI) rose 1% to 107.23. VW fell 1.3% to 155.02.

The CAC 40 was up .1% to 5,727. LaFarge rose 10.5% to 119.01. Renault rose 2.1% to 101.07.

Data from Reuters

Douglas A. McIntyre

The figures are based on percent of US market share of total visits.

Site                           Percent of US Visits                Year-over-Year Change

CNN Money               .0224%                                   (16%)

Reuters.com              .0220%                                    95%

TheStreet.com           .0185%                                    33%

TheFool.com              .0165%                                    59%

Bloomberg.com          .0129%                                    38%

Forbes.com                .0126%                                    14%

WSJ.com (paid)          .0111%                                    58%

Portfolio.com              .0058%                                    NA

BusinessWeek.com    .0049%                                    18%

Douglas A. McIntyre

The value analysis that simply looks at revenue does not address the issue of larger media companies picking up assets that they believe are strategic. Earlier today, CBS (CBS) bought Dotspotter for a rumored $10 million. The site is a fairly small celebrity property.

SeekingAlpha would have a significant value if it were owned by a large financial media company. It produces over a hundred pieces a day, a mix between its own commentary and blogs from other websites. A number of large financial sites like WSJ.com, NYTimes.com, and MarketWatch.com already run blogs from their own writers. It appears to be considered a hot business.

Based on data from Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast, 24/7 Wall St. estimates that SA has 2,750,000 page views a month. Financial sites tend to get high CPMs due to their demographics, so we have assigned a $10 CPM to the advertisers on the site.

SA runs an average of four display ads on each page, which would bring in about $110,000 a month. The site also has six discount brokers in its "Trading Center". At a $2 CPM, these would bring in another $33,000. Classified and Adsense may be worth another $5,000, bringing monthly revenue to almost $150,000. This does not include any money they bring in from the use of their e-mail lists.

Having a hundred or more stories a day has a special value to sites like Reuters and Yahoo! Finance, especially if they have to pay for most of their current content. Reuters has high editorial costs due to its large number of full-time reporters. The SeekingAlpha stories could drive a high number of page views on a very large financial site.

On a simple 10x revenue model, SA would be worth a little less than $18 million. But, because of the value of the content, and its relative size compared to other financial commentary sites, SA is probably worth twice that amount, of $36 million. TheStreet.com (TSCM) currently has a market cap of $400 million. AOL owns another large financial blogging site called BloggingStocks which is uses to supply content and links to AOL Finance. It probably considers the strategic value of that site to be fairly big.

About a year ago, VC firm Benchmark Capital put money into SeekingAlpha. At some point they will want a return. SA already has relationships with Reuters and Yahoo!.

Deal?

Douglas A. McIntyre

But, Murdoch has probably already figured out that the other big pot of online financial dollars is owned by Yahoo! (YHOO) Finance. It has about 12 million unique visitors a month and hundreds of millions of pageviews. News Corp may not find it terribly hard to build it own version of Yahoo! Finance and go after its big discount broker and banking ad pool.

What does Murdoch already have at his disposal. News. Yes, from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, the Dow Jones News Service, and Fox News. Video. Yes, from the new Fox Business channel. Investing content. From Barron’s and Smart Money. And, its own data base of everything from earnings data to stock quotes.

Don’t be surprised. not even a little, if MurdochMoney.com becomes that largest US financial website on the internet.

Douglas A. McIntyre

AOL has already bought Weblogsinc. It owns popular blogs including flagship Engadget.

But, with the internet operations at newspapers and some other tradition media companies making very little headway, the big blogs take on a very significant attraction. They reach audiences in great numbers. They have credibility. They are not expensive to run. And, they make money.

Take Huffington. According to research firm Compete, it has an audience almost as large as the online version of the Philadelphia Inquirer. As a part of a larger newspaper organization like The New York Times (NYT) or Washington Post (WPO), that audience could probably be much bigger. NYT and WPO need a Huffington or two. Their internet revenues are under 10% of their total and not growing fast enough to keep up with falling print sales. Huffington has raised $10 million in VC money. What is it worth? $100 million. Maybe more. Worth it for The Times or The Post. With the trouble that are in, yes.

The big tech blogs are even larger than Huffington.

According to internet measurement service, TechCrunch has an audience about a third of CNet (CNET). And CNet is in bad shape. It’s blog business has not caught on. In early 2006, its shares were $16. Now they trade at under $8. Do they need a way to improve their reach and image with the online tech crowd?

Alexa actually puts TechCrunch’s reach at double wsj.com. If Mr. Murdock’s News Corp (NWS) is going to start offering Dow Jones (DJ) print products for free, having a large tech news property could be a big deal. Tech site Ars Technica also has a larger reach than wsj.com. Another major tech blog that could enhance the overall web presences of Dow Jones.

In the core financial news field, SeekingAlpha is the largest stock market blog. It runs close to 100 stories some days. That is a lot of extra content, low priced content, for a company like Reuters (RTRSY), The New York Times, or Dow Jones.  More page impressions. A larger audience for online marketing.

The largest blogs will get offers. Too many big media companies need additional outlets and content on the web. The problem for the potential buyers is keeping the talent at the blog sites. Most rely on just one or two big names. But, that is not unlike the issue that TheStreet (TSCM) has with Cramer. He is the franchise. They have to give him incentives to stay.

The New York Times or Washington Post will stop by to see Huffington. It is just a matter of how soon.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Yahoo! Finance had almost 13,7 million unique visitors in August, ahead of MSN Money at 11.5 million and AOL Money & Finance at 10.2 million. But, in pageviews, Yahoo! posted 289 million to AOL’s 266 million.

Forbes, with 6.1 million unique visitors and 64 million pageviews stayed well ahead of other online websites for old media companies including BusinessWeek (MHP), Reuters (RTRSY) and Dow Jones (DJ),

Two sites with strong brands continue to lag. BusinessWeek online had only 11 million pageviews. In August of last year, the BW figure was 27 million.

And The Motley Fool had eight million compared to TheStreet (TSCM) at 52 million in August of this year. In August 2006, The Motley Fool has nine million pageview while TheStreet had 20 million.

Another web property that showed a sharp drop from August 2006 was Reuters. Pageviews fell from 22 million to 14 million this year.

Douglas A. McIntyre

According to CNET, the pact is covering Reuters’ core IT internal services, including e-mail and desktop, and consolidates a number of existing deals and will manage some outside suppliers.  We took our own peak at the announcement and it isn’t from this morning and during a weak where market malaise and volatility ruled it probably seems muted in comparison.  Oddly enough, the term virtualization is thrown in for the entire network, which has to be noise to the ears of VMware (NYSE:VMW) and the few other virtualization providers.  Fujitsu is working with several other organisations, including Dell, Satyam, Siemens and Verizon, to deliver the overall service.

TIBCO Software used to be under Reuters and it eventually was jettisoned into its own company.  That was in the 1990’s and a few years ago it looks like ties were severed.  TIBCO still lists Reuters as a top 100 client on their site and they are still active with the company, but as an ex-parent you have to wonder if it could have gone their way.

We could speculate on it, but there are too many unknowns in light of the pending Reuters merger with Thomson (NYSE:TOC) and we don’t want to create any false buzz on a deal from earlier this week.  TIBCO does still do a lot of work with Reuters and TIBCO did just over $517 million in revenues in 2006 and is expected to jump to $585 million this year.  There is always even the possibility that TIBCO could even get to pick up more crumbs from it.

Jon Ogg can be reached at jonogg@247wallst.com; he is the publisher of the 24/7 Wall St. Special Situation Investing Newsletter and does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Top 20 Online Financial News and Information Destinations

 
Brand or Channel                   Unique Audience (000)                Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)
Yahoo! Finance  (YHOO)         14,878                                        0:24:11
MSN Money  (MSFT)                 11,190                                        0:17:39
AOL Money & Finance (TWX)     9,827                                       0:16:08
Wall Street Journal  (DJ)           7,852                                        0:20:12
Forbes.com                            7,813                                         0:05:54
Reuters (RTRSY)                    6,608                                         0:05:41
CNNMoney                             6,263                                         0:15:49
FreeCreditReport.com             3,276                                          0:09:15
Bankrate.com                         2,928                                          0:05:31
TheStreet.com (TSCM)            2,921                                          0:06:59
American City Business          2,884                                          0:04:01
Motley Fool                            2,871                                          0:10:43
BusinessWeek (MHP)            2,429                                          0:05:06
Bloomberg.com                       2,146                                          0:04:21
About.com Business (NYT)      1,553                                          0:02:16
Smartmoney                           1,487                                          0:11:19
CNBC.com  (GE)                     1,469                                         0:06:28
FT.com (PSO)                         1,239                                         0:02:17
USATODAY Money (GCI)          1,196                                        0:03:54
Google Finance  (GOOG)           1,102                                        0:07:31

Nielsen NetRatings

Douglas A. McIntyre