• by October 4, 2000

Traffic to online trading sites decreases despite upswing in Web banking and growing interest in business/financial information. Women and high-income visitors abandon online trading sites during stock market downturn.

The above is an introduction to the bleak Jupiter report, due for release later today, which found that due to the April stock market shock, the number of visitors to online trading sites during the second quarter of 2000 decreased nearly 20%, despite an overall growth (11%) in business/finance traffic.

The number of women and high-income Web users on these sites has decreased 38% and 27% respectively. Additionally, online- only brokerages lost twice as many unique visitors (30%), as the sites affiliated with offline brokerages (18%). Doom and gloom? Not necessarily. Jupiter found that visitors to financial news sites are twice as likely to have an online brokerage account than the Internet population overall. And, while only 10% of all Internet users have an online brokerage account, approximately 22% of visitors to sites such as CNNfn.com, Marketwatch.com, Fool.com, Bloomberg.com and TheStreet.com have an online account. While the personal finance category - including sites such as Nextcard.com, Moneycentral.com and Quicken.com -- had a higher number of visitors (over 24.2 million) vs. the online trading category (8.1 million), Internet users spend over 30% more time on trading sites per day.

Most of these sites do not currently accept advertising, but considering the huge step eBay took a few days ago, financial sites may also be considering accepting ads. We might as well be prepared.