Yahoo! Finance in trouble

Douglas McIntyre writes on the 24/7 Wall Street site that the Yahoo! Finance web site appears to be in trouble.

McIntyre wrote, “Yahoo! Finance has lost a lot of its key people recently. Some have gone to Conde Nast Portfolio, and others to Dow Jones. Peggy White, the unit’s general manager, made a mysterious departure in June.

“The reason that people are leaving may not just be that Yahoo! is doing poorly. Its stock is near a 52-week low as its display advertising revenue growth has all but disappeared. A lot of the employee stock options have to be under water.

“At the Finance unit, it appears that pageviews are disappearing at an alarming rate. comScore figures for July show a nice increase in the Finance unique visitors, which hit 12.396 million, their highest level in over a year. The figure was a 14% increase over June.

“But, pageviews, which is what display advertisers pay for, have been falling sharply for a year. In May 2006, Yahoo! Finance had 671 million page views. In the fourth quarter of 2006, page views dropped to an average of 413 million per month. In June 2007, the number was 290 million. Last month, the figure was 299 million.”

Read more here.