Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Online Personal Finance Traffic Soars

Thanks NetBanker for this overview of personal online finance sites

Online Personal Finance Traffic Soars; Mint Passes One Million Unique Visitors

imageJanuary is always a great month for personal finance. Consumers working off holiday spending binges and/or attempting to live up to New Years resolutions naturally find their way to personal financial management sites. It's especially pronounced this year as consumers try to better understand their spending and manage for the downturn.

So it's not surprising to see that traffic grew by 300,000 unique visitors in January (+20%) compared to December. Total traffic was up 4.5-fold at sites open for a year or more (see Table 1). Including the class of 2008, total traffic was 2.0 million, a 5-fold increase from a year ago.

Highlights:

  • Mint had another great month, increasing site visitors by about 200,000, a five-fold increase in the past year. Mint's gain in January was more than that total traffic of all nine 2008 newcomers combined. Mint had a 60% market share of the total of 1.8 million visitors in the category, about the same as December. image
  • Geezeo continued its wicked pace, growing 30% during the month, and posting a 12-fold increase over a year ago.
  • Quicken Online, which launched in January 2008, more than doubling to 150,000 visitors compared to December. However, traffic at Quicken is hard to compare to other sites due to the massive traffic at its parent site: for example, <quicken.intuit.com> received 1.2 million visitors and <intuit.com> website had more than 10 million.
  • image Wesabe was the only site in those open for a year or more that turned in a traffic decline, falling more than 30% in the month. However, keep in mind the Compete estimates are derived from an online panel and are not always accurate, especially for sites in the low six-figures or less. The company said that it had record page views in January. That includes both the traffic from the U.S., measured by Compete, and international visitors.
  • BudgetTracker also turned in amazing results, nearly doubling its traffic to an imageestimated 27,000 visitors.
  • Of the 2008 startups (see Table 2), Thrive was the only one showing strong growth, increasing 50% over the previous month. Friday the company was acquired by Lending Tree for an undisclosed amount.

Table 1: Traffic at online PFMs launched more than 1 year ago

Jan 2009 Dec 2008 Jan 2008 YOY Chg
Mint 1.1 mil 890,000 200,000 5.2x
Geezeo 220,000 170,000 18,000 12x
Yodlee 120,000 100,000 84,000 44%
Finicity/Mvelopes 100,000 71,000 91,000 10%
Wesabe 89,000 140,000 56,000 60%
BudgetTracker 27,000 14,000 15,000 86%
Buxfer 22,000 15,000 13,000 78%
PearBudget 12,000 7,600 4,200 3x
ClearCheckbook 11,000 9,100 4,600 2.3x
Total 1.7 mil 1.4 mil 490,000 4.5x

Table 2: Traffic at the online PFM class of 2008

Jan 2009 Dec 2008 Month Chg
Quicken Online 150,000 53,000 1.8x
PNC Virtual Wallet 41,000 45,000 (9%)
Rudder 39,000 61,000 (35%)
Thrive 21,000 14,000 52%
Scred 2,600 630 4x
Expensr 2,500 3,700 (32%)
RateSurfer 2,100 3,600 (41%)
Expensify 1,400 600 2.5x
Banzai 1,300 1,500 (15%)
GreenSherpa 400 ina --
iThryv 210 2,100 (90%)
Total 260,000 185,000 41%

Source: Compete, 7 Feb 2009; estimates of monthly unique visitors from the United States

*The percent changes were calculated from the underlying data set and due to rounding of the monthly traffic figures, the percentages may look slightly off

Note: For more information on the market, see our Online Banking Report on Personal Finance Features and Online Banking Report on Social Personal Finance.


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