MarketWatch, the owner of a leading financial news site, CBS MarketWatch, is soliciting bids expected to be as much as $400 million for the company, executives involved in the sale process said yesterday.

MarketWatch, which quietly put itself on the block early last month, operates one of the few Web sites born in the late 1990's that has survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble amid a torrent of competition from more established news organizations.

Some of those media companies are among the suitors, including the CBS unit of Viacom; Dow Jones, which owns The Wall Street Journal; The New York Times Company; and possibly the Financial Times Group of Pearson, the executives said. Yahoo is also a suitor.

MarketWatch hired UBS to conduct the auction, the executives said. Final bids are due in the next week. A spokesman for MarketWatch declined to comment.

A successful sale would mean another rich payday for Larry S. Kramer, a former newspaper editor who created the site, then Marketwatch.com, for the Data Broadcasting Corporation in 1995. Mr. Kramer, who had been an editor for The Washington Post, The Trenton Times and The San Francisco Examiner, is now chairman and chief executive of MarketWatch and owns 148,000 shares.

His first big payday came when Data Broadcasting formed a joint venture with CBS and took the new Web company public. The initial public offering of MarketWatch.com was one of the fireworks of the Internet boom: its shares leaped 475 percent on their trading debut.

The free news site, now called CBS.MarketWatch.com, had 5.8 million unique visitors last month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The parent company, MarketWatch, has diversified beyond relying solely on advertising revenue from the site.

It created a separate business, selling licenses for its online financial software tools to other Web sites, allowing their users to chart stock prices and other data. The company also has several paid subscription newsletter products and is building a financial news service for big institutional investor clients with a partner, Thomson Financial, to compete with the Dow Jones Newswires and other financial news services.

MarketWatch reported third-quarter earnings yesterday that were double the previous year's, citing growth in online advertising revenue. Its shares rose 10 percent, to $13.71, in Nasdaq trading. The stock is up 78 percent since mid-August.

Dow Jones is considered the front-runner, the executives said, because of the savings it could squeeze by combining some MarketWatch operations with others in its company.

Dow Jones is particularly interested because acquiring MarketWatch would provide access to a wider Internet audience and a bigger slice of the online advertising market. Dow Jones's Wall Street Journal Web site requires a paid subscription and subscriber growth appears to have leveled off at about 700,000 users.

Dow Jones would also hope to convert some MarketWatch subscribers to paid subscribers of The Journal's site, the executives said. In addition, the company would be able to cut editorial and back-office functions that overlap, the executives said.

A spokesman for Dow Jones declined to comment.

Viacom has a 22.4 percent stake in MarketWatch as one of its original backers. It also provides in-kind advertising; the site's Web address is frequently mentioned on CBS programs.

Executives close to the process said CBS wanted to acquire MarketWatch to protect the brand value it helped create and to help expand its own news site, which links users to MarketWatch. Viacom has also been expanding its Web business; it recently bought Sportline.com.

A change-of-control provision in CBS's deal with MarketWatch could prevent future owners of the company from using the CBS name, the executives said. A Viacom spokesman declined to comment.

Yahoo, which has the deepest pockets, is interested in using MarketWatch to help bolster its Yahoo Finance area, which has little original content, the executives said. A spokesman for Yahoo declined to comment.

The New York Times Company, the executives added, is interested in adding to its digital properties, and would use MarketWatch to send more readers to its own site and would send Times readers to MarketWatch.

The New York Times is a partner of MarketWatch, using much of its data and its charting abilities in its business section; The Times's Web site also runs some articles from MarketWatch. The Times Company's last foray in the online financial news business - an investment in TheStreet.com - was unsuccessful. CBS MarketWatch discussed merging with TheStreet.com in 2000.

A spokeswoman for The New York Times Company declined to comment.

It remains unclear whether the Financial Times Group, publisher of The Financial Times newspaper, was planning to make a final bid in the auction. Its parent, Pearson P.L.C., owns a 22.4 percent stake in MarketWatch. The company indicated interest in buying MarketWatch in earlier rounds of the auction, the executives said, but its current position is uncertain.