Assessing TheStreet.com's fourth-quarter earnings

Peter Kafka of All Things Digital takes a look at TheStreet.com’s fourth-quarter results.

Kafka writes, “No surprise that Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com had a crummy fourth quarter: Selling ads or subscriptions for a financial Web site was a tough proposition in the last three months of 2008. But maybe things will get better later on this year, right?

“Nope. Advertising was down 21 percent at TheStreet (TSCM) during its last quarter, and the company expects things to get worse. ‘Early indications suggest that the year-over-year decline in advertising revenue that we saw in the fourth quarter will increase in the first half of the year,’ Chief Financial Officer Eric Ashman predicted in the company’s earnings release.

“But wait: Unlike other online businesses, TheStreet isn’t completely dependent on advertising -– it sells expanded access to its content via subscriptions. Won’t that help? Nope. Ashman: ‘The pressure on the subscriber base is likely to continue as many investors are no longer market participants, and job reductions in the financial sector reduce the pool of interested consumers.'”

Read more here.