• by Shankar Gupta , September 13, 2005

CNN and Time Inc. will next January merge their business and finance media properties under the CNNMoney.com flag, combining content from well-trafficked business sites like Fortune.com and FSB.com under one digital roof.

The content deal includes the Time and CNN properties CNNMoney.com, Fortune.com, FSB.com, and Business2.com. Vivek Shah, the general manager of the Fortune/Money Group, will run the business portion of the partnership. The editorial operations will be overseen by CNNMoney.com's Executive Editor and Vice President, Chris Peacock.

The point of the deal, according to Shah, is to offer the users of the various sites more broad content, as opposed to having them jump from site to site. "The user is to the point where he doesn't want to bounce around--he wants breadth from a single site," he said. "And if we attract the number of users in terms of quality and quantity as well as length of visit, that'll translate into a very compelling opportunity for advertisers."

Ads will be sold on the site by a joint sales team of Time Inc. and CNN; advertisers will be "buying the site" and not the content from individual properties, according to a spokeswoman from the Fortune Group.

When the sites combine in January, however, they could face some fairly stiff competition from the other large players in the online finance world, especially major portal sites like MSN and Yahoo!.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the combined, non-duplicated traffic for the CNN partner sites was 9.2 million unique users in July 2005. MSN's finance page--MSN Money--garnered 10.4 million uniques in July, and Yahoo!'s finance section claimed 11.9 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

And although the deal will consolidate the traffic of the partners' sites, the strategic aim of the alliance is to increase the length of visit of each user more than simply to grab traffic. "The portals generate a lot of their traffic from people within the portal environment--but still, the numbers aren't that disparate," Shah said. "At the end of the day, I think that bringing these brands together will translate into a higher volume of traffic, and more importantly, we'll engage these users early and often."

Shah also said that the hybrid site's main competitors will be other stand-alone destination sites such as MarketWatch--which, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, captured 4.6 million unique users in July 2005. "Already, CNNMoney is in a pretty competitive situation vis-à-vis those sites--the combined entity will only make that more powerful," he said.