|
|
|
| |
|
We service the finance segment of the business information industry. The United States business information services industry is large and growing with a total market size in 2006 of approximately $46.5 billion according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. We believe there is an increased demand for financial information arising from increasing complexity of investment instruments and that consumers will increasingly rely on the Internet as the principle source of information that they use to access this information.
The number of individual investors in the United States investing in funds has grown at a significant rate. In 2006 the United States individual investor market consists of approximately 55 million United States households, according to the Investment Company Institute, up from just 4.6 million United States households in 1980.
We intend to make the financial information we provide to our visitors accessible to investors first by paring back the amount of information available to investors, and focusing in on a specific segment of the investment industry, namely funds, and second by presenting this fund specific information to consumers in an approachable, easy to navigate manner.
|
We believe that our target market, individuals with, or considering, an investment in an investment fund, is a multi-trillion dollar industry. As reported by the Investment Company Institute in its 2007 Investment Company Factbook, the United States mutual fund industry was a $10.6 trillion industry in 2006, accounting for 48 percent of the $21.8 trillion in mutual fund assets worldwide. We believe that hundreds of billions of dollars flow annually into funds of all kinds. We also believe other large financial services industries like banking, mortgages and credit cards are successfully served by online companies like Bankrate.com, Lendingtree.com and Creditcards.com, respectively, however, we believe that the fund industry lacks similar vertically focused distribution providers. We believe that third party distribution of funds have largely been undertaken by financial advisors with traditional marketing channels, including in-person client meetings with brokers. We believe that existing sales channels can be successfully augmented by Fund.com.
In response to consumer demand for detailed and easy to find information on specific topics, the internet has seen an increase in the popularity of vertical online marketplaces. The intention of a vertical marketplace is to provide consumers with the capability to research, compare and learn more about products and services in specific vertical industry sectors. Vertical marketplaces can deliver comprehensiveness, relevancy and efficiency in the form of in depth content for a specific niche to consumers and targeted, higher quality leads and advertising opportunities to advertisers. We consider Fund.com a vertical marketplace. By focusing on funds with Fund.com we believe we will have an advantage over general financial information websites, in that we will be able to go much deeper and present much more structured information on the fund industry for our visitors than the general financial websites can. We believe that fund companies will gain exposure through Fund.com to would-be fund buyers who are much closer in time to a purchase decision then someone searching for fund information through a search engine or a site focused more on stocks than funds.
We believe that several factors will make www.fund.com a successful vertical marketplace:
- Aggregation of all fund related content; and
- Ease of use; and
- Presentation of unbiased information, thus allowing a user to trust that our marketplace is
working for them, not for advertisers; and
- Relevant and in-depth content.
|
|
|
|
|
