Seeking Alpha on Yahoo Finance
Congratulations to Seeking Alpha for financial and investing blogs making the big time through a partnership with Yahoo! Finance. As some of you may know, I was a contributor to Seeking Alpha for several months. I’m grateful for the exposure, and I wish David, all the editorial staff, and all their contributors the best in their future endeavors. This is certainly a feather in their cap.
I was wondering how the partnership would work out in practice, so I went to Yahoo! Finance to check it out. I didn’t see any mention of Seeking Alpha on the front page. I clicked “News and Commentary” on the tabs near the top of the page, which took me to the top stories page. At the time I checked, no stories from Seeking Alpha were listed individually in the middle of the page, and most of those in the middle were AP and Reuters feeds. So I scanned the sidebar, and the sixth item down is “by provider” and, lo and behold, Seeking Alpha is listed as one of many providers of news to Yahoo! Finance. Clicking that link brought me to the Seeking Alpha page. The current format is an article title, followed by a credit to Seeking Alpha, followed by a timestamp. In the summary-slash-teaser line, the actual author is credited, as in “Joe Blogger submits.” So I clicked through again to read an article. The article format is first a bold font credit to Seeking Alpha, followed by a larger bold font article title line, followed again by a timestamp. In approximately the same bold font as the credit to Seeking Alpha is a hyperlink with the author’s name, which goes to the blog of the author if he or she has one.
If I follow the process from Yahoo! Finance to reading a complete article, with an eye towards web links and monetization, I will be exposed to about twenty-two advertisements, two of which are links to Seeking Alpha. In the meantime, the blogger who wrote the article will get at least one link directly to his or her site, appearing directly beneath the article’s title on the page with the article. Stepping through the process again, from start to finish, Seeking Alpha gets about a dozen mentions for each mention of even the most prolific author’s name, and Seeking Alpha gets the first credit on every title line.
Now, don’t get me wrong! I’m not against ads! Heck, I’ll probably have ads on this site in two shakes of a lamb’s tush! But if you submit your material for the purpose of gaining exposure to a wider audience, to an aggregator that presents your work in its entirety, you should be aware of a few things:
(1) The site you submitted the material to will get most of the “credit” in the minds of readers, regardless of byline. If you don’t believe this, name the author of the last Sports Illustrated or Forbes article that you’ve read.
(2) The site you submitted the material to will get to sell a lot of ads on top of your work, and they probably won’t share that money with you.
(3) Because they show the reader the money shot, there’s not much reason for the reader to visit your site. So you get exposure and not traffic, and it’s harder to monetize exposure than it is traffic. Especially so, given (1), above.
I reviewed the Seeking Alpha arrangement in a post at the old site, and I don’t want to repeat it verbatim. At Seeking Alpha, the contributor is mentioned by name several times, but most links go to his or her “author page” on Seeking Alpha’s site. Each post by a contributor supports seven or more advertisements, and the essence of the transaction is as follows: contributors get exposure without getting traffic, Seeking Alpha gets content to sell ads over. I calculated the click-thru rate for articles to the original blog at somewhere just north of 0.5%. Even an established blogger could get his or her work read by five times as many people through contributing, but unfortunately, that five time increase in readership amounts to about a 3% increase in traffic.
The transaction has at least four parties: aggregators, readers, contributors, and advertisers. It’s up to each party to decide if the transaction is worth it. As I’ve learned more about how the web works, I decided that my initial decision to contribute was an uninformed decision, and that’s my fault, as all of my uninformed decisions are. Had I known then what I know now … I would have made a different decision. Oh, bother.
September 13th, 2006 at 8:41 am
precisely.
September 13th, 2006 at 11:55 am
[…] The Seeking Alpha deal with Yahoo! Finance has received a great deal of (not surprisingly) positive coverage from the blogosphere. However Bill Rempel at No DooDahs! has a thoughtful piece on where the value accrues in these sorts of networks. Whereas Roger Ehrenberg at Information Arbitrage sees this as a big step forward for the investment blogosphere. […]
September 13th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
I’ve read your piece and Roger Ehrenberg’s piece at Information Arbitrage What I haven’t seen is anyone talking about this in the context of both Yahoo and Google battling it out in the Financial Information space. Yahoo Finance has been around since the mid 90’s and now Google is in beta with its Finance Site. Yahoo has annouced blog searches to counter Google. I see this another front in that war. Seekingalpha has good content and is independent, their earnings call transcriptions are worth the price of admission. This Google-Yahoo war in financial sites is going to drive alot more of these kinds of deals.
September 13th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Good point, Robert.
September 13th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
I don’t allow anonymous comments with spoofed email addresses. Please feel free to drop your name, use a real email address so that your future comments can skip moderation, and a website url if you have one.
September 13th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Anonymous comment with content quoted and responded to, along with link cleanup.
“You’re completely wrong, Bill — lots of us are seeing a ton of traffic.”
Do you know the click-thru rate? How many times the submitting website was hit is the numerator, how many times the article was read is the denominator. A “ton of traffic” could easily be 0.5% of the total readership – which is my point, the collaboration increases exposure far more than it increases traffic. And who monetized that exposure? I’m certain it wasn’t the “blogger.” They can only monetize traffic.
“Look at the AAPL quote page tonight: Articles from bloggers via seeking alpha are two of the top 10 headlines!!!!!”
At the time I looked, an article by Michael Church of Church Capital was the only one from SA on the board at AAPL. Five minutes later, it was off. There may be ten of ten from SA next time I look.
I’m gonna pick on Michael for a minute, and I hope he doesn’t take it personally, ’cause it’s not personal. Church Capital has been an active capital management firm for 19 years, and the founder, Gregory Church, has been in the business for over two decades. Michael is an investment professional, I would guess the son of the investment professional founder of the firm, going to the same alma mater as his father, and the firm is a mutual fund manager.
This gets to the heart of a discussion I’m having over at Information Arbitrage about what is a “blogger” and what is in the “long tail” that David Jackson spoke about.
Defining a “blogger” as “anyone who uses a weblog to disseminate information” is both a trivial and a useless definition. Now, if you choose to call anyone who blogs a “blogger,” what would you call Warren Buffett if he used a blog to communicate? Would something from his blog appearing on Yahoo!Finance be treated as a “victory by the blogosphere” or “finally! respect for bloggers!”???????
Just my opinion, but long-term industry insiders are neither bloggers nor part of the “long tail,” regardless of the format they use to communicate. Even if you disagree about their “blogger” status, I think you can agree they’re professionals, and this is just an adjunct outlet for them to solicit business through.
“And yesterday 4 of the top 10 headlines on ebay were blog posts from seeking alpha!”
Well, luck of the draw shows one piece from SA on EBAY at the moment I looked, and it was from Tim Boyd, another long-term financial analyst, one of many employed by Caris & Company. Again, we may disagree about whether he’s a “blogger” but he’s certainly not in the “long tail.” Another piece by an industry insider.
“And look at what nyquist says about what happened to his traffic (from posts of his about intel that appeared on yahoo finance).”
Good for him! But we’re back to the click-thru rate. His traffic from SA has gotta be a small percentage of what his exposure from SA is. Meanwhile, someone else, namely SA and YF, is monetizing his exposure through traffic at their portals. I don’t know what Andrew Schmitt’s history is, so he may actually be a “blogger” in the “long tail” for all I know.
“What determines what comes up is the timing, not some whacko conspiracy theory about bloggers being exploited.”
I never said it was a whacko conspiracy. Thanks for the ad hominem, because it shows where you’re at and where you’re coming from – especially when combined with the lack of web page link and the “anon@” email address. I also never called it exploitation. It’s a business exchange, wherein a contributor submits material in return for vastly increased exposure with a very small percentage of that exposure being traffic. The aggregator gets content to sell ads over. That’s not exploitation. That’s business. I’m just explaining the business.
“Don’t know why you’re so obsessed with trying to bash these guys – “
I’m not “bashing” anybody. I’m calling it like I see it. You may see it differently. Here’s what I see.
1. Most of the content on YF through SA is “echo chamber” – either WSJ rehash, Cramer’s picks, or long-time industry insiders seeking another way to get customers to their portals. There are some “long tail” legit “bloggers” getting through, but they are the minority of the material.
2. The material is heavily monetized. That’s the heart of the trade-off, right there. SA and YF are getting to sell a lot of advertisements, and the contributor gets a tiny fraction of the exposure as click-thru traffic. Now, a tiny fraction of a lot of exposure can be a lot of traffic, but think about 100-200 times that much traffic … and imagine almost a dozen ads viewed for every hit … and think about who’s really benefiting more.
3. The key is whether the contributor cares about monetization, and if so, does he think he can get more monetization out of letting SA and YF more widely distribute (and monetize) his work. If he doesn’t care about monetization, is he OK with SA and YF monetizing his work in exchange for exposure, or does he hope to parlay that exposure into a job (writing or analyst)?
“this deal has put stock market bloggers on the map big time.”
As discussed above, most of the material is regurgitation and long-time investment pros trolling for business, along with the occasional employee analyst of SA. We probably differ over whether those can be called “bloggers,” but they certainly aren’t in the “long tail.” There are some legit bloggers getting through, but they’re in the minority at the moment, and, it seems, every time I check. Must be bad timing. Maybe the ratio of amateur-outsider-long tail-bloggers to posts will increase over time, so it’ll match the hype.
“and yes, it’s delivering a lot of traffic.”
A tiny fraction of the exposure they sell ads over becomes click-thru traffic. Now, if that is a lot of click-thru traffic, it must be a whole lotta lot of traffic that saw those ads on YF and SA.
“In fact, although it’s hard to load, here’s a video clip of the yahoo product manager on cnbc defending stock market blogs (just imagine!!!):”
Cute video. Joking! It took forever to load so I canned it. I saw the interview live, Joe Kernen really must believe the mainstream media fact-checkers are perfect and never ever get anything wrong – or on second thought, he might have actually believed that the majority of material would be from amateurs and outsiders in the “long tail.”
This deal isn’t the victory for bloggers that everyone thinks it is, although the buzz is certainly a victory for SA and YF. It’s a triumph of advertising, with the few amateur-outsider-long tail-bloggers that participate are trading increased exposure in return for content that’s monetized by someone else. If they’re happy with that, more power to them.
What some choose to characterize as “bashing” is just a look at the content, who gets to monetize the content, and what the various parties get out of it. If you want to see some real bashing, here are some comments from other bloggers on other sites. Note, none of them are mine.
“I don’t read SA either, but I assume Jackson is making a fortune … walling off content is crazy, as David well knows.”
“the trend and avalanche of people wanting to be famous is a strong wind at their back. what it is doing though is further displacing wealth into haves and have nots”
“The key to all good web-based business models is getting some sucker to do something [provide content] for nothing.
“One of the good things about having a venture capitalist behind your idea is the networking relationships and the IN’S with big players like Yahoo for the possible OUT.”
“What I see is Yahoo keeping a possible enemy close but not threatened enough to buy. Too big and clunky. Love to see how they get out of this one at Benchmark.”
“To me it’s just noise. Smart and eventually buried Venture Capitalists trying to bulk up Seeking Alpha with Yahoo Finance. Good from far - Far from good!”
“Oh snap! It just hit me that Seeking Alpha actually raised some capital. Man, why didn’t I come up with the business model of getting a bunch of people to write for me for free. damn.”
Now, that’s what I call bashing! I’m assuming that they were under the impression it’d mostly be amateurs doing the content, from the tone they used.
However, knowing that much of the content is from investment firms, it makes sense that they’d view the deal as a win-win. After all, their traffic is light and the new visitors they get are highly likely to end up as clients. So for them, it’s a great deal!
I would encourage any investment firms who are reading this article, and this comment, to view my explication of the Seeking Alpha business model as an advertisement for Seeking Alpha. If you sell a newsletter or manage OPM, or if you have ambitions to be a writer or analyst, submitting your work to Seeking Alpha is a good deal. If your ambition is to remain an amateur blogger, it’s not a good deal – I think those folks are better off monetizing their own traffic.
September 29th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
I don’t think pubishing blog articles on Yahoo! Finance is a bad idea - but for heaven’s sake - PLEASE do not call them “headlines” - they are not. They are a blogger’s opinion and not headlines. Google Finance started incoporating blogs alongside their quotes long before - but at least they had the brains to list them under “blogs” and not “news”!
And about David Jackson - amen! to all those who have figured it out. He is a genious to get a bunch of bloggers write content for him for free and makes me doubt how financially savvy these bloggers are! lol. They write the content, David makes the moolah - nice! :-)
March 12th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
[…] last wrote about Seeking Alpha about a year and a half ago. It might be worth refreshing your memory, including reading the […]
August 6th, 2008 at 6:26 am
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