• by March 12, 2004

BusinessWeek Online says business is rebounding, and that it's aggressively seeking to enlarge its audience by offering more breaking news, original content and exclusive special reports, and streaming media. The McGraw-Hill unit plays in the overall Web business and financial category, but sees its primary rivals as Dow Jones & Co.'s Online Journal and Forbes' Forbes.com.

In January, BusinessWeek Online raked in 2 million unique visitors who spent an average of 5 minutes on the site, according to Nielsen//NetRatings data. The Online Journal squeaked past BW, with 2.2 million unique visitors. More revealing, however, was that the average time spent on the WSJ.com was 33 minutes. Forbes.com surged past both sites in January to snare 3 million unique visitors, spending an average of 4 minutes on the site. The Nielsen traffic numbers for all three sites have fluctuated during the past few months.

There are, however, much bigger fish swimming in these waters: Yahoo! Finance racked up 11.3 million unique visitors in January, followed by MSN Money with 10.8 million, CBS MarketWatch with 9.7 million, and CNNMoney with 8.7 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

While Forbes and the Journal are in White's peripheral vision, they're not the only ones. "You have to keep your eye on everybody. Yahoo! Finance, CBS MarketWatch, Fortune, American City Business Journals with BizJournals.com--they all have strong reach," says Peggy White, general manager, BusinessWeek.com.

Video streaming is a relatively new area for BusinessWeek Online, and White is still looking for scale in the market. Currently, the site streams newsmaker interviews as well as excerpts from BusinessWeek's weekly TV show. "It's all about packaging," White emphasizes: "What you're really doing is packaging the impressions that you get from viewing the video commercials. It's another way for advertisers to wrap themselves around content that speaks to their audience." White says BWOnline currently accepts Unicast's new video commercial format.

As for new features and content, White says BWOnline is "a lot more than simply the magazine on the Web," which is a common assumption. She says the staff is churning out 30 original articles per day and special reports (on topics such as Wi-Fi, travel, and telecom) that run at least every two weeks.

The special reports are exclusive to one advertiser.

White says BWOnline's ad sales revenue is up 100 percent year-over-year as of February 28. This year, she's hoping for growth in the vicinity of 20 percent: "It's aggressive, but given our audience growth and improvement in packaging and product, it doesn't seem to be out of reach."