MFOHome About Commentary Discussions Funds The Best Resources Support Us!

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Sign In Register

Categories

In this Discussion

Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.

    Support MFO

  • Donate through PayPal

MFO reader data numbers. Very interesting.....

catch22catch22
edited July 2013 in Off-Topic
As noted in the July 1, 2013 MFO commentary; the new MutualFundContacts web site is in place.

At that site, the "about us" internal link provides, in part; the following:

The Mutual Fund Observer (MFO) is a free, independent, non-commercial site with 11,500 monthly readers. Our readers include representatives of a hundred financial services companies and nearly a thousand financial advisors, as well as thousands of investors and curious readers. It’s widely regarded as one of the most reliable sources of objective fund analyses.

I am curious as to how the following numbers are known: Our readers include representatives of a hundred financial services companies and nearly a thousand financial advisors..

Respectfully and semi-lucid,
Catch



Comments

  • hank
    edited July 2013
    Hey Catch - Good to hear from you. A few months ago I mentioned something David had written (positive) about one of their offerings while talking to a T. Rowe Price rep over the phone. He immediately logged into MFO & began quoting verbatim from David's monthly Commentary. He remarked (something to the effect): "This guy's got the inside scoop, doesn't he?" (-: (-: So yes, I can confirm at least one of those reported readers exists.
  • David_Snowball
    edited July 2013
    Hi, Catch.

    Google Analytics tracks numbers of unique visitors (hah!), visits, pageviews, length of stay and so on. The aggregate numbers (10,500 - 11,500, depending on season) come from there.

    Folks can, optionally, sign up to be reminded of our monthly updates. There are nearly 4000 people on that list. Because folks (mostly those I was interviewing) kept asking, I had an analysis of email domains run. Roughly, we stripped out the individual names (the "David@" part) and sorted all of the domains, and tracked the numbers of individual addresses associated with each account. There are, for example, four addresses associated with MutualFundObserver.com (me, chip, Junior and Charles).

    Some addresses were obvious (DowJones.com or ones which industry identifiers like EagleCPA). In others, we simply clicked on the domain name (Cohenfund.com) to get an idea of what sorts of activity they were engaged in.

    The vast majority of addresses are Gmail or another major provider. But we were able to identify about 65 universities and 70 fund companies, some with many registrants, and 30 or so other support firms (back offices, marketers, media specialists, distributors). The financial advisors number is an extrapolation: start with the percentage of identifiable addressees associated with financial planning firms (a lot of ML.com) and then guess what percentage of the rest of the readership is likely in the same box (I discounted by two thirds - of those we can ID, about one-third are CPA/CFP/RIA sorts and so I'm guessing about one-tenth of the total).

    Squishy, but I don't know how to do better without getting intrusive (and I don't intend ever to get intrusive).

    David
Sign In or Register to comment.