I find Cramer to be fairly fascinating and a great entertainer. He seems to be wrong with his picks more than he is right however. The advertising dollars aren’t going to recover for some time due to the state of the economy. TSCM has acquired more online properties, but their advertising revenue has actually gone down.
No surprise that Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com had a crummy fourth quarter: Selling ads or subscriptions for a financial Web site was a tough proposition in the last three months of 2008. But maybe things will get better later on this year, right?
Nope. Advertising was down 21 percent at TheStreet (TSCM) during its last quarter, and the company expects things to get worse. “Early indications suggest that the year-over-year decline in advertising revenue that we saw in the fourth quarter will increase in the first half of the year,” Chief Financial Officer Eric Ashman predicted in the company’s earnings release.
But wait: Unlike other online businesses, TheStreet isn’t completely dependent on advertising–it sells expanded access to its content via subscriptions. Won’t that help? Nope. Ashman: “The pressure on the subscriber base is likely to continue as many investors are no longer market participants, and job reductions in the financial sector reduce the pool of interested consumers.” Article by Peter Kafka.
In 2009, Cramer will be paid $1.56 million, a 20-percent increase from 2008, according to the filing. His base salary will increase another 20 percent in 2010. He also gets six weeks paid vacation.
I personally use many publications, several websites and gather great stock information from everything available from all media sources. Cramer is definitely entertaining and has a lot of good commentary on a wide array of companies. The Street.com is on my list!
