Recently, the Motley Fool decided to discontinue producing the weekly Industry Updates. We came to this decision after a long, thoughtful evaluation of the kind of traffic that the updates were generating relative to the effort that was going into producing them both on America Online and the Web. The conclusion was that for the small amount of traffic that the Updates provided, they were consuming a disproportionate amount of our available production and editorial resources.

As a relatively small company in an extraordinarily large industry, in order for us to be successful it is important that we focus on areas where we can generate enough reader interest to support a feature or service. Because we have made a very conscious decision to offer all of our online content free to our users, it is important that each feature generate enough traffic to support itself. Although the Industry Updates were an excellent source of valuable information, with only a few hundred people reading individual reports every week we decided that readers would get more benefit if the Fools involved just focused their attention on the message folders.

As the Motley Fool continues to grow, we will occasionally be forced to re-evaluate where it makes sense to deploy our resources. At some point in the future, we may decide it makes excellent sense to put the effort necessary into creating a vibrant industry area where dozens of industries are covered by a crack team of industry Fools. For now, all of the writers you have become familiar with through the Industry Updates are right there in our Industry message boards, continuing the quality conversation that originally prompted us to ask them to write weekly articles about a year ago. Tune into the conversations in those folders and you may find there is more there than one weekly update ever could have contained.

Regards,
Randy Befumo (TMF Templr), a Fool

The Industry Fools have banded together to bring you new, updated industry information.

Herein you will find updates on the movers and shakers in these industries, all the haps from this past week.

Fool on!

WEEKLY REPORTS

Airline  (07/13)
Food  (07/03)
Gaming  (07/11)
Healthcare  (07/21)
Networking  (07/09)
Paper  (07/11)
Real Estate  (06/26)
Retail  (07/10)

Visit The Industry Message Boards