WSJ Passes MSN Money and AOL Finance As Web's Second Biggest Finance Site, Nielsen

Over the past year, the Wall Street Journal Digital Network has passed both MSN Money and AOL Money & Finance to become the second biggest site among the top 15 Financial News & Information Sites tracked by The Nielsen Company. Yahoo! remains the leader.

Nielsen reports that the Journal and associated properties had 15.7 million unique visitors in April, vs. 9.2 million in April 2008. Yahoo! remains the leader with 23.5 million uniques this year versus 21.5 million last year.

The report includes the WSJ.com and Barron's, which are mostly subscription-based, and Marketwatch and All Things Digital, which are free.

Here is a statement from Gordon McLeod, president of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network about the new Nielsen numbers:

"The dramatic growth in traffic to WSJ.com and across The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is a testament to the superior content our team puts out daily. More and more people continue to discover the quality, authority, and credibility provided across our own network of sites, and that motivates us to push forward with more investment and innovation to keep our loyal and new users engaged with content not found anywhere else."

We assume that the financial crisis has expanded readership and the September redesign has been a factor. Supervising the redesign at the Journal is Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor. In September, after the redesign was launched, we sat down for this interview. I have republished it today.

Other Movers on the List

CBS Interactive's BNET financial site shows up eighth with 4.4 million uniques. It wasn't on the list last April. Today, the company announced the launch of a consumer site called CBSMoneyWatch. Here's the report on MediaPost.

Google Finance, which just came out of Beta, doesn't show up on the top 15 sites.

These Nielsen's numbers for the top 15 Financial News & Information Sites for April, 2009 have not been publicly released. See below: