Good evening fellow AGORACOMers. Stockgroup (owner of Stockhouse.com) announced their Q1 numbers today and the company continues to lose a lot of money. I’ll discuss those details below.
Stockhouse Loses 10 Million Pages, AGORACOM Gains 10 Million Pages .. But The Numbers Still Don’t Add Up.
The bigger piece of news is that page views on Stockhouse are down 10 million/month. Coincidentally, AGORACOM is now reporting 10.5 Million pages per month.
We’ve been reporting increasing traffic numbers since the launch of our “Investor Controlled Discussion Forums” on October 5th, so we’re not surprised at the correlation. However, what we can’t reconcile out of the Stockgroup Q1 report was the following statement:
“Stockhouse ended the quarter averaging 1.06 million unique visitors vs. 0.81 million an increase of 31% and 69 million page views vs. 79 million in Q1/08 vs. Q1/07.”
How do you increase unique visitors by 30.8% but reduce page views by 12.7%? Over a day, or a weekend, or a holiday week, it is possible. But over an entire quarter is simply confusing? You would expect the base of 810,000 visitors would keep reading the same amount, while the additional 250,000 would add extra page views.
So how do you explain a drop in page views? If anybody has an answer, I’m listening.
Stockgroup Continues To Bleed Red Ink
In this quarter, the company lost $1.44 million vs a loss of $557,000 in Q1 2007. The company says this is due to increase costs associated with their new site, as well as, reduced ad revenue as a result of their prolonged beta – but $900,000?
It wouldn’t be such a big number if they hadn’t used the same excuse in Q4, where the company lost $1.1 million and Q3, where they lost $2.3 million. For the entire year, the company lost $5.1 million.
Can you attribute all of this to re-design, etc.? I don’t think so – and I think I’d know what it costs to re-launch a site given the fact we went through it this past fall for a tad less than $5.1 million. Nonetheless, I’ll give the company the benefit of the doubt and see what they can pull off next quarter, the first full quarter of operation under the new site.
Regards,
George
p.s. Sorry for the incorrect logos but it seems the Stockgroup and Stockhouse sites are rejecting any connection with them, so we can’t link to their logos.
Thanks, Mike and agreed. As you can see, I strictly discussed the facts – page view losses and income losses. More importantly, I tried to reconcile each of those losses and even stated “Nonetheless, I’ll give the company the benefit of the doubt and see what they can pull off next quarter, the first full quarter of operation under the new site.”
Cheers,
George
Many acedemic and professional studies agree that speaking negatively about your competition actually brings your credibility down….
Thanks for the reply and analysis Dom. Makes sense – and doesn’t sound like a good trend.
George
One way in which you can Increase unique visitors, AND decrease page views is by :
1. doing lots of promotion and marketing
WHICH
2. will drive lots of new visitors to the website
BUT
3. who immediately leave the site after discovering that it’s not very good, or fails to deliver what was promised.
In short, a site with many unique visitors, but decreasing page views is a site that promises but doesn’t deliver.