Remembering MarketWatch, Now Ten Years Old

I remember the launch of MarketWatch. I was the CEO of FutureSource then. One of our customers was DBC, an early shareholder in the then new financial news site. Larry Kramer was brought in to be the head editor. CBS (aka Viacom) was a partner, and, DBC sold its interest off. Pearson, the British publisher became a partner.

Most people probably forget what a huge risk it was to launch an online financial news site then. Ten years ago, investors got their information from newspapers and business magazine. Financial TV was in its earliest stages.

MarketWatch was a public company for six or seven years. The CBS and Pearson interests did not always see eye-to-eye. Famous investment banker Bob Lessin was on the board of directors and seemed to have the roll of balancing the interests of the two sides. And, eventually, in 2005 the entire company was sold to Dow Jones. I was a member of the board at TheStreet.com then. We were always impressed at how big MarketWatch got in a short period, and what it was worth when it was sold. Five hundred million dollars seemed like a lot of money then, but I still think MarketWatch is worth more than Facebook.

One impression of MarketWatch should be unchanged after all of these years. The website was always the best destination for breaking financial news. There were really no exceptions to that. During the dial-up era of 1997, the interfaces and graphics at the site were not as fancy. But, there was no other place to turn on the internet to get information as the daily financial news raced by.

TheStreet was more of a commentary site, even then, although it had started out reporting more news. The financial sections of the portals like Yahoo! were geared toward personal investing and pulling together news from the AP and Reuters. The Motley Fool had almost no news. The founding brothers there cared about giving the personal investor good solid advice about making money in the markets.

All of this is to say that MarketWatch is today what it was when it started. I used to visit the site several times a day back then, and I do today as well. Financial news has a short shelf life, sometimes just a few minutes. MarketWatch has made those minutes count. It readers never had to sit and wonder what was going on. The journalists at MarketWatch got it to the front page of the site within minutes.

I don’t remember what the front page of MarketWatch looked like ten years ago. I do remember that most of us in the industry thought the launch was an audacious undertaking. We probably believed the company would not make it. But, the amount of time we spent on the site put lie to that.

And, now that the site is big and successful, most of us are still coming back. The competition now may be financial TV, Portfolio.com, Forbes.com, and The Wall Street Journal Online. But the fastest way to the best financial news is still through MarketWatch.

Happy birthday.

Douglas A. McIntyre was the editor-in-chief of Financial World. He was also president of Switchboard.com and financial news and date company FutureSource.