TheStreet.com survives when bigger players enter the market

Maria Aspan of The New York Times writes Monday about how TheStreet.com continues to thrive despite bigger players entering the online business journalism market.

Aspan wrote, “For 11 years, TheStreet.com has developed its identity as a small, reliable financial information Web site, a quiet and somewhat plain publication buoyed by the loud, larger-than-life personality of its co-founder, Jim Cramer. But after weathering the dot-com bubble, the ups and downs of the stock market and an attempt to sell the company, TheStreet.com’s slow success has recently jump-started efforts to expand its content and ambitions.

“‘There are not that many Internet media companies that have leadership in their field, that are growing as fast as they are, that are still independent,’ said Mark May, a senior Internet analyst for Needham & Company, who has been following TheStreet.com since 1999. ‘They’ve been around a long time; they’ve basically learned a lot of lessons.’

“Those lessons came early and often after the Web site’s initial success. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, TheStreet.com’s publicly traded stock plunged to about $1 a share; at one point in 2004, the company hired the investment bank Allen & Company to ‘explore strategic alternatives,’ which amounted to declaring itself on the market for a buyout.”

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