The market gyrations of recent weeks has nearly doubled traffic to financial websites. Bad news elsewhere should be good news for them, right? Wrong. Their most profitable advertising is sold in advance; neither publishers nor advertisers can anticipate swings in traffic, so the bumper crop of pageviews doesn't mean a windfall in ad sales. As Hamilton Nolan notes in Gawker, this is a good time for new sites like the Business Sheet and Big Money to attract readers — but a lousy one for them to build their own business.

Contact information for this author is not available.