August Business Website Numbers: Small Lead For Yahoo! While BusinessWeek And Motley Fool Fade

August audience figures from comScore show that Yahoo! (YHOO) Finance maintains a lead in unique visitors over rivals AOL Money (TWX) and MSN (MSFT) Money, but that the large pageview advantage that it once had is almost gone.

Yahoo! Finance had almost 13,7 million unique visitors in August, ahead of MSN Money at 11.5 million and AOL Money & Finance at 10.2 million. But, in pageviews, Yahoo! posted 289 million to AOL’s 266 million.

Forbes, with 6.1 million unique visitors and 64 million pageviews stayed well ahead of other online websites for old media companies including BusinessWeek (MHP), Reuters (RTRSY) and Dow Jones (DJ),

Two sites with strong brands continue to lag. BusinessWeek online had only 11 million pageviews. In August of last year, the BW figure was 27 million.

And The Motley Fool had eight million compared to TheStreet (TSCM) at 52 million in August of this year. In August 2006, The Motley Fool has nine million pageview while TheStreet had 20 million.

Another web property that showed a sharp drop from August 2006 was Reuters. Pageviews fell from 22 million to 14 million this year.

Douglas A. McIntyre