Marketwatch.com plans to grow internationally

Damien Hoffman of Wall St. Cheat Sheet interviewed Marketwatch.com editor David Callaway about the Web site’s plans to grow its business news presence.

Here is an excerpt:

Damien Hoffman: David, with the internet creating a very competitive landscape, how will you keep MarketWatch on the leading edge of financial journalism?

David:  We need to expand our audience. MarketWatch has been around for twelve years now, so our audience in the US is mostly set.  Our audience is a hundred million people who own stocks or mutual funds in the US.  However, online financial news is only getting a small fraction of that.  So, there is a lot of room for growth.

Growing internationally is really where we need to focus.  We need to get our name out there.  We have journalists in Europe and Asia.  In the Middle East we have somebody, but we still have a very young brand name when compared to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Rupert Murdoch is always fond of saying there is a whole generation of people moving into the middle class who are going to want to consume financial products.  I subscribe to that theory and think there’s an opportunity for MarketWatch in the next ten years to become more a brand name in Europe and Asia.

Damien: Do you plan to create partnerships with preexisting outlets abroad, or are you building everything from the ground up?

David:  About eighteen percent of our total traffic is outside the US mostly — but not exclusively — in the English speaking countries such as the UK, Canada, Australia, China, and Germany.  During the first ten years of MarketWatch’s existence, most of those people have been investors or people interested to see what’s going on in the US.  Likewise, our US readers have been interested in what we’re doing in China because they’re interested in buying Chinese Internet stocks or Macau gambling stocks.  For us to see some scalable growth we need to start covering stuff for Europeans in Europe and for Asians in Asia.

Read more here.