SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- MarketWatch.com, an innovator in business news, personal finance information and investment tools, today announced MarketWatch Community (http://community.marketwatch.com), a financial news service featuring tools that let users discover, organize and share MarketWatch.com content with other readers.
Available to registered MarketWatch.com users through a Community tool, or widget, to the right of every article, MarketWatch Community provides a live view of the business stories, stocks and financial topics that are resonating most with users. In addition to letting readers directly add comments, recommendations and tags to articles, the service allows users to build networks of friends, find other users based on their level and nature of community participation, and gain points for correctly predicting share price movements. Users can track and organize their community activity on profile pages, which they can personalize with images and bios.
"MarketWatch Community highlights the voice and lens of the user while providing a robust interaction with our award-winning editorial content," said Jim Bernard, general manager of MarketWatch.com. "In beta we've experienced increases in user loyalty, satisfaction and length of visits. This service extends our innovative approach to news and user engagement, and opens exciting new possibilities for our advertisers."
Using MarketWatch Community
MarketWatch.com users who register with MarketWatch Community can take full advantage of its features.
* Tagging, recommending and commenting -- Readers can tag stories with key words for easy sorting and discovery, recommend stories to other users through a five-star system, and add comments that will appear below stories. These features can be found on a widget to the right of every story on MarketWatch.com. Users can click on the Tags tab in MarketWatch Community to see community-generated tags in either cloud form or list form. Clicking on the Stories tab will present stories attracting the most comments or recommendations in the last 24 hours, week or two weeks. * Picks -- Formerly called MarketPerception, this popular stock prediction widget launched last March has been expanded to include the ability to predict where a share price will close in a day, 7 days, a week or three months. It also now features a point system to provide community-wide ranking. Users can access Picks on MarketWatch.com when they look up a quote for any domestic or foreign stock traded in the U.S. The widget is adjacent to the stock price that is presented upon requesting a quote. Once a quote is presented, users can click "More Results" to go to MarketWatch Community to view point totals earned from their own and those of the week's top 10 point earners, the 10 stocks attracting the largest number of predictions, the 10 with the most bullish forecasts and the 10 with the most bearish predictions. * Friends -- Creating friend networks enables users to create links to each other. Users can click the "Add to Friends" icon on a user's profile page and send a "Friend Request" message. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds in the Recommendations, Tags or Comments areas of friends' profile pages to stay abreast of their activity in the Community.
MarketWatch Community Users Well Engaged
Early trials show MarketWatch Community users are especially engaged:
* 47% of members have made a stock pick. * 21% of members have commented. * Stories routinely garner 30 or more comments. One Aug. 31st story on the mortgage crisis attracted 74 comments. (http://tinyurl.com/3crhtm)
About MarketWatch
MarketWatch, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, is a leading innovator in business news, personal finance information, real-time commentary and investment tools and data. The Company generates more than 1,000 headlines, stories and market briefs a day from 100 journalists in 10 bureaus in the U.S., London and Hong Kong. In addition to operating two award-winning Web sites, MarketWatch.com and BigCharts.com, as well as the stock market simulation site, VirtualStockExchange.com, MarketWatch provides radio updates every 30 minutes on the MarketWatch.com Radio Network and offers subscription products for individual investors, including the Hulbert Financial Digest suite of products, Retirement Weekly and ETF Trader. The Company's MarketWatch Licensing Services group is a leading licensor of market news, data, investment analysis tools and other online applications to financial services firms, media companies, wireless carriers and Internet service providers.
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