Free Financial Content Threatens YHOO, TSCM and Other Portals/News Sites

Will the proliferation of high quality finance blogs threaten mainstream finance portals and news sites? Yes. Three factors are fuelling the emergence of next generation finance portals that will challenge Yahoo! Finance (owned by YHOO), TheStreet.com (ticker: TSCM) and MarketWatch (owned by Dow Jones, ticker: DJ):

1. Explosion of financial content: The number of finance blogs is rising sharply. Seeking Alpha maintains a list of the best finance blogs covering the stock market, the economy, venture capital and personal finance. It now totals about 70 blogs, with new blogs added every week.

2. Rising quality: Many of the new finance blogs are written by professional money managers, financial advisors, academic economists and venture capitalists. The quality of finance blog content is often equal or superior to financial content written by professional journalists.

3. Ease of aggregation: Most new finance content sources are RSS-enabled, because they are authored using blogging software. This allows other web sites to aggregate high quality content from multiple sources in one location:

• At the most rudimentary level, Bloglines (now owned by Ask Jeeves, ticker: ASKJ) allows users to share and track feeds from multiple blogs. Feeds from the entire Seeking Alpha list of the best finance blogs, for example,  can be viewed at http://www.bloglines.com/public/SeekingAlpha. This effectively gives users a one-stop shop for financial content - in other words, a next-gen finance portal. Furthermore, the entire list of blog feeds can be easily downloaded (instructions) into a desktop or web-based RSS reader, allowing users to customize their own finance portal by selecting their favorite feeds.

• Sites are emerging that allow search focused on new financial content. PhatInvestor, for example, allows users to search by ticker or keyword accross multiple finance blogs.

• Micro-cap company Financial Content (ticker: FCON.ob) is beginning to syndicate financial content from blogs to second-tier news and finance sites. SFGate's Business & FInance area, for example, delivers content from The Internet Stock Blog, Media Stock Blog and China Stock Blog in response to ticker queries.

 

In sum, lower barriers to web publishing (using off-the-shelf blogging sofware), rising quality, and ease of aggregation due to RSS are providing the tools for the creation of next generation finance portals. This is the competitive impact of The Long Tail.

FCON.ob chart below.

Full disclosure: at the time of writing I'm short TSCM.

Comments

[User 159377]

GlobalCrossroadsCapita... features several blogs to include; 12 Market Factors & Collocation of Capital.
Finance portal has seen a 30% traffic increase in February 2008.

2008 Mar 02 10:10 PM

[relmar2003]

Street.com business model is terrible. In my opinion, the stock is worthless. Its definately looking like a spent lottery ticket. I would probably just give this stock to debtors. It really shouldnt even be a stock.

2009 Oct 05 09:01 AM