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Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model

by: David Jackson April 10, 2008    
David Jackson

David Jackson

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Until now, I’ve written relatively little about Seeking Alpha as a business. But a debate has started, prompted by Barry Ritholtz, about Seeking Alpha’s model versus the goals of bloggers. So here are some thoughts on the "blogonomics" (term coined by Felix Salmon) of Seeking Alpha.

Seeking Alpha grew out of my own experience as a blogger after the bursting of the tech bubble. Typepad, Blogger and WordPress had cut the cost of web publishing to zero. By 2004, a growing number of professional and retail investors were blogging about stocks and the market. We weren’t writing to generate income as journalists; in fact, journalism as a profession was (and continues to be) under extreme financial pressure, reflected in the relentless decline of the newspaper stocks. Instead, we loved writing, loved the freedom of instantaneous publication, and loved the exchange of investment ideas. And hey, if we could promote our careers or businesses at the same time, all the better.

The biggest challenge as a blogger was the sense of disappointment when only a handful of people read your posts or left comments. By 2005, writing a blog sometimes felt like running on a treadmill: to build your audience, you needed to publish multiple interesting posts per day, and that was hard work. But while the number of blogs competing for readers’ attention grew exponentially in 2005 and 2006, traffic to the average blog wasn’t increasing in step. The audience was growing, but still wasn’t big enough.

Seeking Alpha was a vision for how to win an audience that was big enough. By “big enough”, I mean equal to the exposure professional journalists receive on mainstream financial websites - that is, tens of millions of readers.

What would it take to win that audience? Seven factors:

1. Human filtering of authors and articles. Readers need help finding the best authors. They need to know that the authors (who often prefer to remain anonymous) aren’t fraudulent and are disclosing positions in stocks they write about. And even if an author has fulfilled these criteria, filtering is required at the article level because a personal blog about stocks might contain articles about other topics. You can’t filter for quality, integrity and relevance with algorithms or auto-republishing of RSS feeds; you need human editors.

2. Comprehensive ticker coverage. There are two ways readers access financial content: they read top headlines about the biggest stories of the day, and they read articles by stock ticker, either through a “quote page” or as a list of stories under a portfolio. Access via stock ticker accounts for the clear majority of financial readers' attention. So to win a serious audience, you have to drive relentlessly for comprehensive coverage of stocks.

3. High-quality reader experience. Headlines need to be accurate and informative. Tagging by stock ticker, sector and theme needs to be accurate and not excessive. Typos, spelling and grammatical errors need to be corrected, and tickers added after company names using a consistent format.

4. Compelling complementary content. To win a really large audience, a financial website needs some form of regular news coverage to complement the opinion and analysis provided by contributors. And if you can also provide something uniquely valuable and unavailable elsewhere, you'll attract a dedicated, high-quality readership.

5. Great web site. It’s no surprise that almost every business that started as a blog had to develop its own publishing platform and website. That requires web designers, programmers, product managers, and scalable web hosting.

6. Partnerships. Large repeat audiences don’t build rapidly without partnerships. And partnerships require business development, lawyers, indemnification, and the tech resources to implement agreements.

7. Plausible business model. All this costs a ton, and it’s not worth doing if there isn’t some pathway to profitability. That means a dedicated sales force, as ad networks don’t generate enough revenue.

This is what we built with Seeking Alpha. There are about 40 of us in the company, including 16 editors and 16 people in the tech team. We publish the best free one page roundup of the financial news each morning, summaries of Barron’s, Cramer and the housing market, and about 3,000 earnings conference call transcripts per quarter. You can search for articles or transcripts by phrase or stock ticker, view comments by stock ticker on our new forums, and soon view articles by watch list or portfolio.

The combination of editorial oversight and business development allowed us to partner with Yahoo! Finance and E*Trade. Neither of them would have linked to contributor content without editorial oversight. We’re generating ad revenue, but aren’t yet profitable.

We're also not perfect. We occasionally publish articles that should have failed our quality filter, we miss typos, and sometimes our editors make mistakes with titles.

But the hard work and investment has paid off: type almost any stock ticker into Seeking Alpha (or Yahoo! Finance or E*Trade), and you'll find a variety of intelligent and thoughtful viewpoints from multiple authors. As a result, Seeking Alpha had over two million unique visitors in March (Compete understates our traffic, but is directionally accurate).

That’s what we bring to the table.

How does this look from the contributor’s perspective?

Well, if you’re a blogger, the incremental effort and investment you need to make is precisely zero. You do nothing; our editors do all the work. (They might make a mistake and mis-title your article, but they’ll answer your email immediately and fix the error if that happens.) Duplicate content problems with search? In the entire history of Seeking Alpha, we haven’t had a single contributor who reported that their traffic fell after we started selecting and republishing their articles. Our contributors retain intellectual property rights to their articles, and can pull out of Seeking Alpha at any time with a simple email.

While the marginal cost is zero, the marginal return is undoubtedly positive. Contributors get exposure to finance professionals, investors and senior executives who are able to find more about you, your money management or research business, your investment newsletter, your blog or your book.

We know about our readers from our email subscribers, and they include employees in every major investment bank, and dozens of hedge funds and mutual funds. Jim Cramer said in an interview recently that he trawls Seeking Alpha for potential hires. We’re the only finance site that devotes the left column of every article page to links and information about the author (including two graphics if authors wish), and we’re constantly thinking about ways to add value for our contributors.

Bloggers now have exposure that was unthinkable a few years ago. And instead of building audience by climbing on the treadmill of publishing multiple articles every day, they can now write thoughtful pieces when they're ready to.

Who doesn’t Seeking Alpha work for? We haven’t ruled out paying contributors in the future, but we’re not ready to do it now while we're investing in growth (which we're convinced our contributors will benefit greatly from). As a result, we never imagined we’d be attractive to bloggers who want to build media businesses, and sure enough a handful of such writers pulled out. Hopefully they’ll do well, but as more and more talented people publish free articles for exposure, career development and business leads, it gets tougher to make a living from paid content. Most of those who left still seem to be searching for a revenue model, and their exit from Seeking Alpha has had no positive effect on their traffic or income. Conversely, some of the most prominent bloggers and mainstream media publishers have recently become contributors, perhaps recognizing the brand-building potential of reaching such a large and focused audience.

Some hard numbers: The cumulative number of contributors to Seeking Alpha surpassed 1,300 in March. Fewer than ten regular contributors chose to cease publishing on Seeking Alpha during the entire first quarter. Over 100 new contributors joined each month in January, February and March.

I'll leave the last word to one of our contributors. Literally as I was writing this, Asif Suria emailed me as follows:

...after my recent article about NetSuite's software and support was published on Seeking Alpha yesterday, I was contacted by the Director of Customer Support from NetSuite to help us resolve the issues I mentioned in the article. This kind of exposure is just one of the reasons I have continued to contribute to Seeking Alpha for well over 2 years.

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This article has 71 comments:

  •  
    Apr 10 06:08 AM
    Business Week just published an article called "Financial Blogs: The Best of the Bunch", and Seeking Alpha is the first site mentioned:

    "If you're dipping your toes into the financial blogosphere for the first time, start with portal SeekingAlpha, which calls itself a "one-stop shop" for stock research. Tom Taulli, an author, blogger, and dealmaker, says he uses SeekingAlpha's conference call transcripts regularly."

    www.businessweek.com/i...
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 06:52 AM
    Thanks David for the great explanation (and gratuitous compliment). I appreciate that you kept things above the belt.

    It's natural that different (business) models work for different people, depending on their goals. The exceptional outcome of financial blogs, IMHO, is that the average retail investor now has access to information and analysis as good -- and often superior -- to the research once available only to professionals. Hopefully Seeking Alpha will continue to be a big part of that.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 07:34 AM
    Great Article !
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 07:43 AM
    I remember when Seeking Alpha was spun out of Tech Uncovered (which I found through your article on ETFs). The site has come a lot way since then, and it's great to hear how it's doing and what the strategy is. I myself am among the smallest of small investors, but I have learned a lot from reading SA, especially about ETFs (still my main interest), things I don't think I could have learned anywhere else. (And of course it's also flattering that a couple of my comments got highlighted in articles, something I can't imagine happening anywhere else.)

    Best wishes for the future success of Seeking Alpha! You really are pioneering a new medium here; see for example Marc Andreessen's recent blog post on the birth of newspapers for some historical perspective on both the difficulty and the importance of doing that.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 08:20 AM
    David,

    Inspiring words as usual.

    Recent post from Felix Salmon that I found enlightening: www.portfolio.com/view...
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 08:24 AM
    It seems that the point of the article is a response to something Barry Ritholtz wrote.

    I did not read Barry's article, but I wanted to, in order to get a bit of background info before reading your article.

    I did a very quick search on SA for "Barry Ritholtz", but couldn't find anything directly relating to this.

    So, which article of his are you responding to?

    I think most will agree that SA has really made life easier. There is so much info out there on the net, but the articles and info on SA takes the best of what is out there, and puts it on one website.

    So, thank you for this! Continue doing what you need to do in order to survive and thrive.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 08:56 AM
    As a small private investor I have been a regular reader of Seeking Alpha for about a year now and I cannot thank you enough for just doing what you do.

    The breadth of opinion and analysis has helped me learn about individual stocks and the market in general. The quality of articles is generally very high. I most appreciate the long idea articles.

    I understand that the authors see the site becoming more and more successful and begin thinking they should get a piece of the pie. But if you are not breaking even - what do they really expect to receive?

    I used to read Barry Ritholtz, and given the 2 photos, bio and 3 links to his sites that appeared by his articles I would have thought he'd be satisfied with the traffic going back to his sites. Obviously he wanted more...

    Anyway - don't let a handful of splitters get you down!
    KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 08:59 AM
    PS I forgot to say - Congratulations on the new Forums!
    I think they are just awesome!

    Comments on articles really put the articles to the acid test.
    There is not much that gets by your readers.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 09:00 AM
    Frank -- that really brings back memories! Tech Uncovered turned into a TypePad blog, then a WordPress blog, then Seeking Alpha... It's an honor to have kept you as a reader all these years.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 09:08 AM
    b3rkut -- Here's the link to Barry's post, in which he set the stage for the comments in a way that guaranteed that every single one would be negative, and sure enough they were:
    bigpicture.typepad.com...

    And here are two responses we've seen:

    Felix Salmon:
    www.portfolio.com/view...

    Joseph Weisenthal:
    www.thestalwart.com/th...
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 09:11 AM
    Helluva job guys. I've been with you guys from day one. Your feed is #2 on my reader (MyYahoo!) right behind Silicon Alley Insider.

    Keep up the great work!
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 09:27 AM
    I've been publishing through Seeking Alpha from almost the beginning and while there are certainly some real advantages to the extra exposure, I also feel like SA doesn't treat their writers very fairly.

    The cost of syndicating through the site is zero, but there is a real opportunity cost that we give up as writers. Over the last several years, many stories that I've written have hit the front page of Digg, Slashdot or other large sites, but it's the Seeking Alpha copy that has gotten coverage instead of my own site. This really isn't SA fault and has more to do with other bloggers and journalists being lazy, but it is frustrating to work on an article only to see it quoted elsewhere as Seeking Alpha said this or that, instead of recognizing the work that the author put into it.

    I'm willing to give up this traffic in exchange for having access to SA's platform and there is a real argument to be made that someone wouldn't have even seen my articles to begin with if it weren't for the SA business model, but this problem does set the stage for tension between SA and their writers.

    Providing a cut of the advertising revenue would be one way to reward writers, but I think that it would be a mistake. Anyone who is trying to write for CPMs or CPCs isn't making the best use of the platform. You bring up a number of good examples where people can use SA to advance their careers, but since my writing is mostly a hobby, I'm more interested in what I can do to improve visibility on my own blog.

    When I first started publishing through SA, David Jackson told me that there would be minor editing to ensure the quality on the site, but that none of my links would ever be changed. This was our deal and I viewed this as a social contract. I provide good content and you provide the platform to cultivate an audience.

    After the site picked up the Yahoo! syndication deal, SA started to change the links in my articles so that they would redirect back to SA's copy of my writing instead of my own site. This is a mistake and one that should be corrected.

    Links are the currency of the blogosphere and by linking back to SA, I have no doubt that it improves repeat page views for your site, but it also takes away one of the huge incentives for your writers. A quick link in a story might not deliver a lot of hits, but it's enough recognition to create an equitable balance between the writer and publisher and it motivates the writer to want to see their articles syndicated in as many publications as possible. Instead, SA leaves in the links to sites outside of their network, but penalizes their own writers by cannibalising their work. I would rather see SA add random links back to their own sites, then to take away a link that I've put in my content.

    I've written privately to SA about this issue several times and each time I've been assured that they would quit changing my content, yet there has been no change in policy to date. When you give your writers lip service and don't follow through, it creates doubts about the integrity of SA and places a strain on the relationship that you have with them.

    If SA really wants to reward their writers, don't give us money, give us the exposure that we are looking for to begin with, that is after all the primary motivator for most writers on the site.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 09:28 AM
    power... to the people!!!
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:02 AM
    Great article. Great site. What I don't get is the business model. Is all revenue from ads on the site? Or is it build traffic then cash out? Or are there future plans that I can't see yet? Whatever it is...good luck!

    Also where do the transcripts come from? Can't be just those 16 editors! Do you have a team of consultants too? It's really amazing that you offer them for free. Thank you!
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:10 AM
    Others besides Felix, Joseph, and Barry have written about the business model. Some as far back as Sept 2006. Considering that Felix linked to my March 2008 post before Barry or Joseph posted on the subject, and that some contributors got to thinking about the model (and eventually pulling out) after reading my Sept 2006 post, I'm not so certain that Barry's work prompted the debate.

    www.billakanodoodahs.c.../
    www.billakanodoodahs.c.../
    www.billakanodoodahs.c.../

    It's a good business model for some writers; for example, if they can monetize the exposure through a very expensive service (newsletters, managing money), if they're auditioning for a writing job, or if they just like being made famous while others make money from it.

    Obviously, it's not a good business model for writers that don't fit those categories.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:17 AM
    David, we appreciate the value of your format, where we get articles from a wide variety of authors. This site is truly a valuable compendium of stock market journalism, not a canned product like WSJ or CNBC. It's also great that you let the readers take shots at your journalists, I hope we don't scare too many of them away...
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:21 AM
    I am a SA contributor and I love the exposure my blog gets from my partnership with SA. I think that Seeking Alpha, as a business, is excellent and am amazed by how big it has gotten in such a short amount of time.

    Keep up the good work!
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:28 AM
    Davis, you're totally right about links. We're figuring out this model as we go, and we've definitely made some mistakes. Redirecting links was one of them. The rationale was that we needed to reach critical mass and we wanted to provide a consistent user experience, so we didn't want readers hitting the same article in two locations. But as you said, links are the currency of the Internet, and tampering with them is the same as tampering with someone's article. So (I believe) Mick and his team no longer change links. In your latest post for example ( seekingalpha.com/artic... ), there only seems to be one internal link to your articles, and that's to your own blog.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:36 AM
    Davis, regarding changing links - you are absolutely right, as David says. We've changed that policy across the board.

    Regarding your editorial requests being ignored - I was not aware of the requests at all. I'll contact you personally about it and I apologize. We make every effort to heed contributors' requests re. editorial changes.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:49 AM
    PS - I agree with everything Davis said about links. Allowing us to post links to our own site in our articles would be very much appreciated.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:51 AM
    Thanks, Mick, for the clarification.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 10:57 AM
    Bill (No DooDahs), I think your strong antipathy to Seeking Alpha clouds your judgement, and leads to consistent factual errors in your analysis. For example, I remember when we announced the Yahoo Finance partnership, which originally involved blog posts appearing in their entirety on Yahoo Finance with zero payment to us. That was a real milestone for stock market bloggers. But you were totally condemnatory, and claimed that the deal was only for posts from the A-List bloggers, and that somehow we'd supplied Yahoo with a list of the chosen few. That was factually incorrect.

    Similarly, your posts about the economics of advertising and revenue shares have consistently underestimated the investment required to build and run a serious website and sell ads on it.

    Most significantly, I've never understood your core argument: "Obviously, it's not a good business model for writers that don't fit those categories." But most bloggers don't have a "business model", just as I didn't when I was blogging and you don't (otherwise you'd have a lot more ads on your site.) Our contributors who don't have money management, investment newsletter or consulting businesses blog because they love blogging and want to be part of a wider discussion. Given that the opportunity cost is zero, it's a no lose proposition.

    In many of your posts, you've tried to create the impression that there's an exodus of bloggers from Seeking Alpha; totally bizarre from our perspective when we look at the numbers. That's why I published our contributor numbers at the end of my post.

    Ask yourself a serious question: Given that becoming a contributor to SA is totally voluntary, wouldn't most stock market bloggers at the very least want the *option* to have their articles published to a vastly larger audience?

    Why would you want to campaign against that option existing?
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 11:05 AM
    Yazz, we have about 12 companies doing transcription for us. It's a huge and expensive project, but we think that opening transcripts to a broader readership is compelling.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 11:13 AM
    "Just a small private investor", I'm glad you noticed the forums. We've kept quiet about them as we're still seeing how they perform. If you have any suggestions for improvement, let me know.

    For anyone who hasn't tried them, here's a link to the forum on Citigroup:

    seekingalpha.com/symbo...
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 11:26 AM
    David - I appreciate the response, but believe that you may be mistaken. The article you referenced doesn't contain any links back to my site (although I've since set up the TiVo.jp domain to auto forward to davisfreeberg.com because this article was meant to be an April fool's joke.)

    If you take a look at any of the articles that I've published on SA, you'll see that 90% of the davisfreeberg.com links have been changed to SA. Here is an example where SA changed my links from just last month.

    seekingalpha.com/artic...

    If you've changed your policy then that is fantastic and says a lot about SA's willingness to listen to feedback from their writers, but in my experience, I haven't found this to be the case. Part of my frustration with the SA business model has been the lack of consistency in following through on these sorts of issues. In Barry's article, he mentions that there were several times that he also privately complained about SA changing content, but it still kept happening. When you tell a writer that you'll quit messing with their articles but don't actually stop, you lose credibility. Hopefully, this is just a mistake and somehow my posts managed to slip through the cracks, but when I see other writers echoing similar complaints, I can't help but wonder whether or not this policy has really changed at all. All that I ask is that you be open and honest about what the rules are. Mistakes happen and are easy to fix, but they wouldn't keep happening, if this practice wasn't still being used on the site. I can appreciate SA's desire to build critical mass, but when it comes at the expense of your writer's critical mass, then it disincentives them from wanting to syndicate their content. I don't mind if SA gets a bunch of traffic from one of my posts getting picked up by Gizmodo or another site, but it does bother me that SA hasn't shared that traffic with their contributors by honoring the integrity of the original article.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 11:40 AM
    Davis, we just changed the linking policy a couple of weeks ago. And as I just emailed you, we simply dropped the ball on your request for this from a while back and I apologize personally for that. You are absolutely right - I just wish you had pinged me on it at some point along the line, but hey, if this episode brings all editorial mistakes to the surface, that's great. We're aiming for no errors and full responsiveness to all our regular and one-off contributors.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 11:46 AM
    Thanks David, Bill for your replies.

    David--a suggestion. A simple way to offer more value to your contributors at no cash cost to you is to change back to the old model of source links. Under the old model, each link to the original post was clear and prominent as the articles began "John Doe submits..." including the link in the article text. Now the link is far less prominent, outside the article body under the author picture.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 12:15 PM
    Yazz, we went the other way precisely to increase the exposure for contributors. Devoting the left-hand side bar to the contributor, immediately below the title, allows us to include a larger photo, a logo for the contributor's business, and a bunch of links. Look, for example, at the side bar on a Barry Ritholtz article:
    seekingalpha.com/artic...

    And here's a contributor with a book in their sidebar, linking to their own Amazon affiliate account:
    seekingalpha.com/artic...

    Part of the reason we designed the page this way was to leave open possibilities for future monetization and promotion for contributors. If you have any ideas, let us know.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 12:50 PM
    David-Thank you for your reply. I don't see why you can't have both. Leave the left side bar as is, and add a link at the beginning (or end?) of the post to the original article permalink.

    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 12:55 PM
    I look forward every day to Eli's roundup of the top financial news. And especially to "Under the Radar News".

    Simply wonderful for busy people who want to stay on top of things.

    I have RSS tickers of many tech areas.

    I certainly hope you achieve profitability and become a permanent entity.

    Regards
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 01:55 PM
    Hi David,

    I invite the readers to judge the tone and content of my previous posts about SA's business model for themselves, and not from your, or my, comments about them, or your remembrance of them.

    www.billakanodoodahs.c...
    www.billakanodoodahs.c...
    www.billakanodoodahs.c...

    Please, feel free to expound upon the investment required! Revenues per page view, page view totals, clickthru to authors' homepages, income, expenses, etc. I'm all ears! Then we might have a discussion about what level of revenue-sharing was possible, or whether contributors might instead get options on percentage ownership of the site, so they might profit if it is bought out.

    I am not campaigning against the option existing. Far from it! If I were monetizing content well enough to be happy with one page view for the many dozens I gave you as a contributor; if I were auditioning for a paid writing job; if I just wanted a lot more people to read my work; you, David, would be the first person I would email. There's no antipathy, it's just that I saw y'all getting money off of my work, and I wanted a cut.

    As it is, if you offered revenue share and some tracking for readership and clickthru rates, or a salary, I would probably come back! I'm DEAD serious there.

    Ask your editor who emailed me during your last recruitment drive, what was my FIRST question? Revenue share. My SECOND questions (left unanswered) were precisely about the dollars and cents of the business model, so if I've underestimated the investment required, it wasn't because I didn't ask y'all.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 02:50 PM
    SA has opened doors for me that were previously closed. It is hard to put a value on the presence one gets from being affiliated with you. It comes down to far more than simple "clicks". Although, after the recent changes you have made to the site, I have noticed a dramatic uptick in traffic. I am convince that many subscribers and current regulars to my blog found me first through SA and then went to my site. As a reference and news site, it is unmatched.
    >
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 03:35 PM
    I like Seeking Alpha. Thanks for putting it up. Now I can vent without pissing off my wife. And I enjoy the occasional verbal assaults others lay on me...try that at my day job and get fired. Thanks.
    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 04:32 PM
    I do think that SA is doing a pretty good job, so keep up the good work. I do have some concerns as I have written in private several times:

    1) I agree with Yazz. After the website revision, it does not appear anywhere on the article the name of my company. Although you have our link on the left under our picture, you should put our company name AND put it at the front of the article like it used to be.. Shaun Rein from the China Market Research Group submits.

    The fact of the matter is a lot of sites copy and paste our articles and never add the name of our companies. Therefore, while my name gets picked up, my company name does not. This is a problem. People now have to click twice before they see the name of my firm... as any good marketer knows, branding comes from active discussion with consumers (an actual slick) , and passive (a visual of the company name). This should be changed.

    2) I used to write once in a while, My firm CMR conducted this research... and provided a link to my company embedded in the article so that if people copied and pasted my piece there would be somehere in the article where I could get credit. Now, if I try doing that, my article gets revised to take the company name out. I know you do not want too many self-directed promos, but I DO this in my BusinessWeek and Forbes commentaries and they allow it. Why not SA?

    China's Rising Retail Market
    www.businessweek.com/g...

    Chinese Seek Quality from Multinationals
    www.forbes.com/opinion...

    3) Frankly, I have cut back on posting because if feel there has not been any quality control in the China section. There are people posting who clearly have no idea what is going on. I am not talking about a disagreement of opinions... I am talking about extremely low quality commentaries.

    I only will write an original commentary for certain publications -- BusinessWeek, Forbes, and SA... I do it for SA because it is clear that your deals with Yahoo and other get huge exposure. But I am also concerned about the erosion of the brand when. There does need to be QC in accepting some of the articles.

    4) I do not have a blog. Pretty much everything I post on SA is an original piece. I hate it when I spend a lot of time on a piece and have it get posted and then have 10 other posts the same day come out on top. I preferred the old site where the most recent 10 articles or whatever would get more prominence. I think you should revert to that.

    Anyway, these are just a few ideas. I think that you are doing an excellent job. I do understand the frustrations of some of the other contributors, as I have had them too. My main problem is more on teh technical aspects.

    The actual number of visitors to my firm's site has dropped since SA's new website was adopted. The new site is terrible -- bad for contributors and not good for readers to navigate as easily.

    S. Rein


    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 04:35 PM
    I enjoy contributing to SA, because writing about stocks for my blog and for SA forces me to do more research and helps me think about individual stocks.

    Because SA has hundreds of contributors and posts dozens of articles daily, I don't see how any individual contributor could attract enough readers to generate meaningful income from SA. I doubt that many readers click on every article, and, as pointed out in the opening post, most search for comment about stocks they own or are researching.

    That SA puts our articles on Yahoo and E-trade is a tremendous incentive for contributors to establish a presence here. A small percentage of readers who click through from Yahoo and E-Trade will find their ways to our blogs and might even become members of our own little online communities. I hope SA makes more deals with other outlets and that it monetizes that business somehow.

    Meanwhile, I suspect SA is putting paid subscription newsletters out of business. Who needs them when there is so much better and timely content here? I also suspect a lot of people who used to go to some of the other major message boards to discuss stocks now come here where articles are edited and commentary is thoughtful and serious. Down the road, I see SA taking ad revenue from some of the current majors that charge annual subscription fees.

    I haven't bought from any SA contributors or advertisers, but I sure link to Bespoke and The Big Picture on my blog, and sooner or later, I would think they would profit form contributing to SA. There's a reason Barron's and CNBC are posting here. They need new readers and know how to promote their services.


    Reply
  •  
    Apr 10 04:46 PM
    Shaun, thank you for your comment and feedback. I'll leave it to Mick to address the editorial issue you raised.

    On the new website: we've designed it to provide much greater exposure for contributors, but a look at your article pages shows that you're not getting the benefit of it. As a first step, we should add your company name to the link, another couple of links, and a large logo for your firm. I'll email our contributor relations manager and ask her to contact you to follow up.
    Reply
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    Apr 10 04:55 PM
    Contributors can help each other by linking to each others' blogs and sites in the pieces they write for their blogs and SA. I've done this a few times, but I'll try to do it more often. I also try to link to the SA conference calls. That will help people learn to read the calls and learn how to use them. Hopefully, as the calls become more popular here, analysts on the calls will ask better questions, and executives will define terms and provide better answers to the questions.
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    Apr 10 05:13 PM
    Thanks David for the response. If you did make those changes, it would be hugely beneficial for everyone involved. Keep up the good work!

    S. Rein
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    Apr 10 05:15 PM
    Donald, I think you're right that we can drive a lot more traffic to contributors if they link to each other, so that their posts on SA contain outbound links to other blogs.

    There's one issue we want to be careful about: we don't want contributors to include gratuitous links to drive traffic, because that would damage the reader experience.
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    Apr 10 05:16 PM
    Also, David, even if you don't give us money or shares for writing the commentaries... I think that you should give contributors who have been around for a while the right to buy shares.

    S. Rein
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    Apr 10 05:30 PM
    Shaun, I was actually going to ask No Doodah's Bill, in response to his comment that "it's just that I saw y'all getting money off of my work, and I wanted a cut", whether he wants a cut of the quarterly loss or the commitment to the upfront investment and full time job. :-)

    More seriously, if we'd have paid contributors in cash or stock or a rev share, the amounts we'd have paid would have been (and probably would still be) discouraging for contributors, because our traffic still isn't large enough to support a split.

    I think we need to grow to the point where participation in Seeking Alpha is even more of a no-brainer for contributors, whether with direct cash payments as Bill Rempel wants, customer lead generation, brand building or other forms of monetization.
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    Apr 10 07:55 PM
    David, thanks for your article and Seeking Alpha. I discovered Barry's blogs through SA, and have become a big fan of his since. He is an established brand now and perhaps simply outgrown SA, but I can say from my experience I probably never would have heard of him without SA.

    For myself though, I have been contemplating blogging about the media industry for several years but did not have time to build and market my own site. Additionally, the exposure on Yahoo and other sites and the immediate feedback I get are invaluable. I completely agree with your analysis of what SA offers a new writer. Just as the proverbial tree falls in the forest, what good is a blog if there is no one to read it?

    SA is a fantastic site and your staff is incredibly helpful. Congrats on your success.
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    Apr 10 08:23 PM
    I am one of the few bloggers who left the SA network in the past couple months. I had mixed emotions about doing so and still do. I'll expound on the motivation to do so and perhaps some fellow bloggers can provide their insight into their thoughts on the decision...

    First, I want to say that when I requested to have SA stop the auto-syndication of the articles since I was going to go off in my own direction, they were very professional and reacted immediately. As such, I've never had a bad thing to say about SA or their conduct. I left the badge on the page and still refer friends and investors to the site.

    My rationale for leaving: When I started getting a decent amount of search traffic from google (as viewed from my sitemeter), I'd click back to the Google search page with that term and notice my link there; in some cases in the top position. This was great; but occasionally, I noticed it only lasted a day and next thing you know, my link was down below the same article as published by SA.

    Obviously, they have a higher page rank, so by posting the same content, unless Google had some sort of method to sort out syndicated articles, the SA article was always appearing first. The example that really got me thinking was when I was getting about 50 hits per day on a single article for a day or two, and then practically nothing. If you extrapolate for that common search term and added in my ECPM, that one article was worth a few hundred bucks a year. And in a day, gone.

    On the flipside, a fair amount of traffic had been coming from the SA articles published. Perhaps some of the advertisers that approached me came from SA as well? Not sure how they stumbled upon my site. So, there was a trade-off. As of now, I'm not part of the network, but (if they'd have me), I'm on the fence as to whether to request to rejoin. Any thoughts on the pros/cons that could help inform my decision?

    I posted this question on my site as well to see what advice the blogging community can lend...appreciate all opinions (and of course, Seeking Alpha for allowing both sides of the story to be discussed on your own blog !).

    everydayfinance.blogsp...
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    Apr 10 10:02 PM
    I can't say that I truly understand why an author would have a gripe with SA since I, personally don't have any monetary interest in blogging or my site. But, I'm sure If I did, like some of the authors here, I would understand quite well. So, I can't really speak to that, and I am pretty ignorant to page rank, links, CPM etc.

    What I can speak to- is I love SA because of how it organizes a community of investors and their thoughts into a neat, accessible place. I think there is significant value in being able to see broad and diverse o