I was checking some of our category level statistics today as I thought we might see some interesting patterns in categories that are growing in the current financial climate. I noticed our Business & Finance category has experienced strong growth in the past year. I looked at the sub-categories in Business & Finance and immediately noticed strong growth for the two largest sub-categories, Banks & Financial Institutions and Stocks and Shares, with share of US Internet visits up 18% and 47% respectively.
I charted visits back a couple of years to both categories and traffic was fairly flat until August of 2007. Since then visits have been increasing steadily to both categories. What happened in August of last year? Looking at news clips from that time, I found that talk of recession heated up at that point ahead of the Fed’s rate hike in mid-September. That rate hike marked the first of many in the past year.
The following chart shows visits to the Banks & Financial Institutions sub-category on the left axis and to Stocks & Shares on the right axis. The vertical lines indicate rate hikes.

The chart illustrates a loose relationship between rate hikes and visits to Stocks and Shares websites in particular. It is always interesting to see how offline events affect online behavior. As consumers become more concerned about their savings, it makes sense that they would more actively monitor stock prices and fund prices.
The next chart is very similar but this time I replaced visits to Banks & Financial Institutions with Internet searches for “recession”. My suspicion is that it is not so much the rate hikes that cause consumers concern as all the news that come along with those announcements.

Now that most people have figured out what a recession is (most searches for “recession” send people to Wikipedia and other information sites), they are busy checking their stock prices. Just remember, buy low, sell high!