Last month marked the three-year anniversary of our publication, and we’d like to share with you some of our accomplishments over the past year and our goals for the future.
Our readership grew substantially this year. A key metric for us is the number of unique “visitors” to our site – the number of individuals who view one or more of our pages at some point during the month. This more than doubled, growing from approximately 20,000 per month in the second quarter of 2009 to over 40,000 in the month of May. We have experienced similar growth in other important measures as well, such as the number of “page views,” which reflects the increased popularity of our site as compared to others serving financial advisors.
Advisor Perspectives now goes out to over 85,000 readers, approximately 95% of whom are financial advisors. Approximately 70% of our readers are fee-only independent registered investment advisors, and 25% are affiliated with a wirehouse or independent broker-dealer. The remaining 5% includes mutual funds, institutional investors, consultants, and sell-side firms. Fewer than 500 of our readers are individual investors.
You may have noticed that we redesigned our web site earlier this year, and we added several new features. Notably, you can now search our database of articles and commentaries by a variety of criteria, including topic, author and date of publication. When viewing an article or commentary, you can display other items by the same author or that address related topics.
The Advisor Perspectives newsletter was redesigned, and hopefully you’ve found those changes make it easier to navigate and read.
Our home page now lists the eight most recently published articles and commentaries, updated continually during the day. We make our articles and commentaries available via Twitter, and the commentaries are available via an RSS feed. I’d like to add a special “plug” for the RSS feed. We post commentaries throughout the day, and by subscribing to the RSS feed, you can learn of those postings when they occur. The RSS feed contains both our abstract of the commentary and a link to its full text. I find that the RSS feed is a very convenient and useful way to view the commentaries and decide which ones to read in full.
