Is MoneySavingExpert worth One BILLION Pounds?

thelawnet

Interesting, in the light of the Moneysupermarket IPO:


http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSL2937126220070629

Finance and travel price comparison Web site Moneysupermarket.com plans to float in London in July in a deal seen worth as much as 1 billion pounds ($2 billion), making it Britain's biggest technology listing for almost 7 years.

Looking at the relative Alexa stats (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=www.moneysavingexpert.com vs http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=www.moneysupermarket.com&url=www.moneysupermarket.com)

Moneysavingexpert gets a little more traffic, but 70% of the hits are to the forum, which are relatively non-revenue generative (I'm not aware of MSE affiliate links being added to forum links), whereas 90%+ of Moneysupermarket's traffic is to its main site, where pretty much every link is revenue-generating. So the relative traffic, excluding the forum, is more like 3:1 in Moneysupermarket's favour.

Plus moneysupermarket is far more avaricious - they don't list things if they don't get commission, and all their content and services are designed to make money, whereas a lot of content on MSE is generated as a public service and has no revenue stream behind it.

So while MSE is NOT worth a billion pounds, it's interesting in respect of the different approaches to basically the same thing, though if MSE had been designed like moneysupermarket on pure profit, it would probably have failed as a copycat (Moneysupermarket has been going 3 years longer).

Doing the right thing has built a site that obviously has massive financial value - not as much as moneysupermarket, but a fraction of a billion quid is a large sum of money nonetheless...