14 DAY TRIAL // The Big Two of the Finance stage, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money, have been forced to bow down with respect to the new competitor and, as a matter of fact, winner of the respective race: AOL Finance, who received a much needed improvement to its site, last November.
comScore.com released the data for December, a short while ago, and it is there, ink on paper (respectively black pixel on white pixel, in case you're not reading the printed version), it only took one month for the "new" competitor to jump ahead of its now runner-ups: AOL rose from 12.2 million unique visitors in November, to 13.5 million in December, a 10% increase. Meanwhile, Yahoo dipped from 13.7 to 13.2 million unique visitors, and MSN Money dipped from 11.6 to 11 million visitors. The combined decrease in Yahoo's and MSN's audiences is almost equal to the gains made by AOL, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com noticed.
It's kind of funny not to hear that Google's similar service is in the race, but when you look at the chart provided by comScore.com, it's down to the point where it's unbelievable how few users the Mountain View based company has managed to get to use its Finance site and service. Then again, it doesn't have the background that the other three have, nor the history. Probably, in a couple of years, it will be up there competing for the leading position, but there's a lot of work that has to go in there, for that to come true.
Back to AOL's site, it recorded 335 million page views, 2 million over the runner-up Yahoo, which had "only" 333 million, but that is actually a drop from November, due to the update that allows users to get updated information without having to refresh the page, so it's a good feature for both ends. Keep in mind that this is still a Beta, the full replacement will come somewhere in the next six weeks or so, as Arrington says.