What combining BusinessWeek.com and Bloomberg.com would mean

Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org has written a commentary Thursday afternoon about what a proposed sale of BusinessWeek magazine to Bloomberg L.P. would mean for their combined Web operations.

Ali writes, “Whichever numbers you believe, even a combined BW+Bloomberg online will be nowhere near the giant in the space. Yahoo Finance is averaging about 25 million uniques a month, according to both data firms. Or catch up to Forbes.com, which not surprisingly had a big drop in traffic over last year (Nielsen: down 23 percent; comScore: down 28 percent), in their sub-category,.

“Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters’ sites, which include Reuters.com and various regional sites, has a big variance in numbers from Nielsen (7.4 million uniques, down 19 percent from last year) to comScore (4.72 million uniques, down 6 percent from last year). None of this takes duplicate reach into effect.

“Of course, in terms of revenues, Bloomberg.com is probably tiny since it really serves as an extension of the terminal, and also likely is smaller than BusinessWeek.com’s revenues. Meanwhile, BW.com’s revenues itself have been out of whack with expenses, as reported before. If the two did combine, it will really have to be about efficiencies of cost, not scale at this point.”

Read more here. Combined, Ali estimates the two sites have between 5.7 million and 7.1 million unique visitors per month.