Blogonomics: The Seeking Alpha Model
-
Font Size:
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.
This article has 71 comments:
"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...
Eli Hoffmann
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.
Dadlani
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.
Liss, SA
Editor
Inspiring words as usual.
Recent post from Felix Salmon that I found enlightening: www.portfolio.com/view...
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.
small
private
investor
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!
small
private
investor
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.
Jackson
Jackson
bigpicture.typepad.com...
And here are two responses we've seen:
Felix Salmon:
www.portfolio.com/view...
Joseph Weisenthal:
www.thestalwart.com/th...
Keep up the great work!
Freeberg
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.
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!
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.
Keep up the good work!
Jackson
Weinstein,
SA Editor
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.
Jackson
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?
Jackson
Jackson
For anyone who hasn't tried them, here's a link to the forum on Citigroup:
seekingalpha.com/symbo...
Freeberg
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.
Weinstein,
SA Editor
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.
Jackson
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.
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
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.
>
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
L. Johnson
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.
Jackson
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.
L. Johnson
S. Rein
Jackson
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.
S. Rein
Jackson
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.
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.
Finance
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...
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 opinion, from many sources, all in one spot.
SA's content - transcripts- That is so huge. I can't tell you how valuable that is, I used to sometime pay 50 because I was too lazy or didn't have time to listen to a call, Truly, written form is thousand times better anyway.
Wall Street breakfast, under the radar, and housing tracker etc. are very helpful. SA provides some awesome content. There isn't any site that can close to matching it.
Most of all, what impresses more than anything- is how SA always listens to readers and authors and, really bends over backwards to give them what they want. I remember when SA launched it's new site format, people were unhappy with lots of changes, but they responded quickly. I wasn't happy when transcripts went to multiple pages instead of one, but they added it back. I can see a lot of financial reasons why SA makes some changes, however, if readers aren't happy, SA has always seemed to change it back.
Not too many places anymore where a business go to great lengths to try make every happy and are receptive to ideas.
hats off - Mick and Mark- You guys have done a outstanding job/
In a way, SA and other aggregation sites give me a free way to provide a trial period. Most newsletters include a cheap or free trial period, but there's work associated with providing it. The subscriber needs to be entered in a database, confirmed, and such. If potential subscribers can test me at SA and other places that show my free content, then by the time they decide to pay for my premium material I will have a greater chance of retaining them as customers. That's valuable.
Now, to the weakness of the SA model and how to reduce it.
Seeking Alpha is becoming Seeking Anybody.
As word gets out on SA and others, the original core group of high quality contributors gets diluted with a rush of less qualified contributors. If hundreds of new contributors are coming onboard SA every month, the signal/noise ratio is doomed to fall simply because:
> Most people in any profession are by definition average.
> Most people writing about finance online are not even in the profession, making them even less likely to be worth the reader's time.
> Material starts to duplicate, anyway, with now a hundred people making the same points about the latest Google headline instead of just the three people you know to be on top of the situation. How many me-too articles does it take to drown? Just the best presentation of each point is enough.
This deluge of contributions is serving to make SA less useful over time, not more. The quality filter needs to be tended to carefully or, as somebody else put it, SA will degenerate into another Yahoo Message board -- utterly useless.
To be clear, I'm not insulting the work of all part-time contributors nor claiming that all pros are great. I'm pointing out that any collection of material from thousands of people needs to be zealously filtered.
One idea is to create an algorithm that judges the accuracy of articles with a simple [buy, sell, hold] over the [short, medium, long] term categorization attached to the investment under discussion, and then track how that investment does against the S&P 500 or other appropriate benchmark during the time frame specified. Over time, a contributor would have an accuracy rating assigned to his or her history that could be viewed in a table like the one at CXO Advisory's Guru Grades:
www.cxoadvisory.com/gu.../
I have a feeling that the vast majority of contributors at SA would object strongly to such a system of accountability due to their accuracy hovering forever around 50%. Few want the world to know that their articles are no more useful than the nearest coin for a flip.
So, an alternative way to rate contributors would be to tally ratings assigned to their work by readers. SA is dipping a toe in this water with the "Did you find this article interesting?" question at the end of each article. That's not very sophisticated, though, and a system like Amazon's 5-star rating where you click on the number of stars that you think the article deserves would work better. I suggest ten stars for a finer scale.
As with DVDs on Netflix, a reader should be able to go back and change his or her rating of an article on SA later. That way, readers could judge whether the article was accurate or not in its forecast. If I write that Apple will hit $300 by Christmas, you don't know until Christmas whether I was right or not. You might rate the quality of my presentation 4 stars now, but want to move that up to 10 stars when Apple hits $300 at Christmas. (This is just an example.)
Similarly, SA should have a rating and categorization of commenters. They have zero accountability and, to be blunt, most commenters are morons. Offline, I've talked with other SA contributors who feel tarnished by the inane comments appended to the bottom of their articles.
If SA could separate the inane from the insightful and then prioritize them appropriately, that would improve the site's quality a lot.
With some further development by SA of rating systems, we can all help to put the best contributors, articles, commenters, and comments on top for easy research.
I hope these ideas help. All in all, I consider SA to be a fine effort and am happy to participate.
L. Johnson
But some of us post on rather obscure stocks and there is little duplication in that department. And I don't see anybody approaching stocks the way I do, so no matter what I write about, there is no duplication. A lot of stocks remain uncovered, mostly because they're not worth discussing. Other contributors have their own approaches, and each contributor adds to the discussion, which is good for readers.
Compared with what I see on many other blogs and boards on the web, I think the posts and comments here are pretty interesting and usually worth reading. One measure of the value of a post is whether it attracts many comments. And when there are a number of comments, as on this thread, the participants tend to keep each other honest and on topic. Comments are the first line of defense for readers, and smart contributors jump into the discussions. Often contributors never check their comments or respond to the ones they get, though.
Also, compared with the M* and Yahoo boards, this place is a pleasure to read. As for the question of whether the pros or part-timers are more accurate or useful, I think this site's readers can separate the good from the weak and useless.
And, no, David, I don't think there should be "gratuitous" links to other contributors' blogs. If I write about a stock and another contributor has a useful post on the same stock, I might go to the originating blog for a link and, hopefully additional content that I can evaluate, quote and link to.
A final comment. As the former owner of a popular board, I found that for every contributor there were 100 to 200 readers. That's pretty good leverage, imo, and the ratio is even higher here—1,300 contributors to 2 million unique visitors per month equals what, 1,538 readers to 1 contributor, and not all 1,300 contributors post to SA every month?
I love SeekingAlpha, but I have to admit... It annoys me to no end when you guys change the title of my blogs. I understand you guys have good intentions, but most of the time you end up changing the meaning altogether. Also, I occasionally notice you try to improve my grammar, but in most cases my grammar is correct to begin with and your editors make it worse. Anyway, I love your site.
Jackson
I think this question goes to the heart of our vision for Seeking Alpha. If all we ultimately offered was a front page highlighting the most interesting articles of the day, then there would indeed be a negative correlation between the number of contributors and the exposure they get.
But the biggest readership in financial content is not the readers of the "front page" -- it's the millions of investors, firms and individuals that follow specific stocks and companies. Yahoo! Finance gets massively more traffic to its quote pages and portfolios than to its front page.
So far, I'd estimate that Seeking Alpha is about 50% of the way there. First, the content is in place: there's amazing coverage across stocks on SA, as you can see if you search for a stock in the search box on the site and see what comes up. Second, we offer email alerts that are fully customizable, so tens of thousands of readers get email alerts on stocks they are watching. The comment from Asif that I quoted at the end of the article is a great example: the executives are Netsuite are watching what is being written about their company on SA.
Where we've been slow is in fully enabling ticker-based personalization on the website. That's about to change. In a couple of months, we'll be rolling out watchlists on the site. They will enable readers to easily view headlines of the stocks they're tracking, and that will be a massive upgrade for readers, and thus for the exposure contributors get as well.
This is the sort of thing I was alluding to in the article when I said that we're aiming for a really huge audience, and it takes a large investment and commitment to do that.
I think that many people don't understand this point. Some people have even suggested that a "best of" or "linkfest" site is an alternative to Seeking Alpha. But the barriers to entry for that product are literally non-existent. James Altucher published one on TheStreet.com, Barry Ritholtz used to do one every weekend, Charles Kirk does one, Abnormal Returns also. They're all great, but they don't answer the massively larger demand for tickerized content and there's nothing to stop hundreds of imitators popping up tomorrow.
By the way, I think that this is a key element causing friction with Barry Rithotz. Barry mostly writes about the overall market and economy, so he doesn't gain from the infrastructure investment we've made in tickerized distribution. We tend to feature overall market and economic commentary on our home page, but for people who want to read Barry specifically they can find him more easily on this site than ours. He gains from the traffic we get to our home page and US Market page, and from the thousands of subscribers to our "Daily Digest" email alert. But that might not be enough for him.
I'm very optimistic about the new personalization and watchlist products we'll be rolling out. The design and tech teams did an amazing job of the forums -- they incorporate a ton of innovative features that overall provide a fantastic user experience. I'm hoping we'll see the same with our watchlists and portfolios. If they're successful, the distribution for contributors will grow dramatically.
Weinstein,
SA Editor
Shaun, regarding greater exposure and linking to your firm - Sharon from our team will be in touch with you today to redo your article sidebar to get this done. Did you receive the email Sharon sent out about this a few weeks ago? And regarding the editorial quality issue, we'll redouble our effort to filter out articles that aren't worthy of appearing on SA, and we'll continue to build out technical functionality that brings the best writing and writers to the top.
Dan, I'd like to understand the SEO issues you raise better. As David said, we haven't seen the duplicate content issue lowering contributors' page rank, but perhaps we missed something that you have experienced. Note that one of the reasons we change headlines is to differentiate our version of the article from the contributor's - for SEO purposes, so the headline/keywords the contributor chose for his/her own site aren't usurped by SA in search engines. But changing headlines creates its own set of challenges, as we've seen. The other reason we do it is simply for impact and clarity - a headline like 'Midday Update' on a blogger's site clearly won't work well in syndication to Yahoo Finance, our email list, E*Trade, etc. We welcome you back at any time, Dan, and we'll work together with you on this.
Jason, I'm glad SA works well for you. Regarding 'separating the inane from the insightful', well first of all we shouldn't have anything inane, so I'd appreciate it if you ping me when you see something that you think is unworthy of appearing on SA. Our editorial team is tasked with making the often difficult call on 'Is this a post that someone who invests in this sector/this stock would want to consider, alongside everything that's available in the mainstream news?' This obviously involves judgment, and difference of opinion, but we strive to keep the quality bar high. And re. giving our most insightful authors more exposure, that's what our homepage should be doing - we're working on design and functionality changes to facilitate this.
Mark, thanks for your support for SA. I'm sorry you've been unhappy with some headline and textual changes. I'll contact you personally now, including the editor who handles your posts, to improve this going forward.
And no, I did not receive any email from Sharon a few weeks ago.
As for some of the critiques here, I just do not get them. I just emailed David this... but I personally will not submit a commentary to anything but a top tier publication... BusinessWeek, Forbes, level ... and SA.
The outreach that SA gets it incredible in terms of readers is really remarkable and the SA team deserves a heckuva lot of credit for making one of the best channels in the business.
Thanks.
S. Rein
Freedland
Thank you for all of your work here on behalf of all of the rest of us.
I am one of the over 1,000 contributors to SA--and a recent one at that.
Investment blogging is a tricky proposition. There are many writers who add their opinions to the blogosphere without regard to accuracy, reliability, content, or even stylistic excellence. Having a 'third party' like yourself that is reviewing blogs and in effect credentialing the website is more than helpful.
We can all become more successful working together than by going 'solo'.
Many of us hope that eventually this blogging effort becomes financially successful for us. I believe that the Seeking Alpha model will assist us in that effort.
Insofar as measuring our success at 'picking' stocks, I would suggest SocialPicks as a model of a website that measures success. I participate over there as well. For reviewing actual performance, I have been using Covestor, which I am aware you have been instrumental in bringing to the public. I thank you for that as well.
Seeking Alpha participation is also useful in adding to our exposure on the Yahoo Finance search engine where SA has enabled recognition for content by small bloggers like myself that would not otherwise have that opportunity.
For distribution into mainstream content, I would also suggest bloggers visit with Newstex and similar services where RSS feeds can be turned into content for compensation by their 'Blogs on Demand' feature.
The future of financial/investment blogging is certainly exciting and I am glad to be part of Seeking Alpha and watching all of this come together.
Bob
Maybe this little tempest can help you guys re-focus and provide a bit of highlighting for the really interesting stuff. That's what 'human editors' are supposed to do, rather than fiddle with grammar or titles...
If you wanted to be profitable now, you and I both know you could be. I run a financial site, that receives 450k to 600k unique users a month. We have a total of 4 people writing (including me) and one independent blogger and are profitable.
I could only imagine that you could have incredible gross margin as well if you so chose to. But, I do understand you are investing in growth and the future, and that is a sacrifice you are willing to make. I am surprised though that it takes 16 editors to edit and produce your daily content. Maybe I am not seeing all the internally produced daily content?
Jackson
Regarding the idea of taking a cut of that quarterly loss ~ I doubt you're taking any losses without anticipation of future gain, either through selling the site to a larger company (TSCM?) or through eventual profitability. Tell you what, determine how big a share you want to offer me, open up the books for me to evaluate it as an investment, and I'll let you know. Keep in mind that I'm swinging a retail account here, so if you need a big, meaningful investment, that might rule me out.
Regarding the idea of a full time job ~ send a serious offer. I can do several individual-stock posts weekly, from a hard-core value perspective, from a CANSLIM perspective, from a GARP perspective, or from a "examine the hot stock today