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

January 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.
• 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.
• 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 estimated 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.