Yahoo Finance Now Carries Seeking Alpha Articles

Today is a big day for Seeking Alpha and its contributors. Yahoo! Finance now carries Seeking Alpha stock market content, accessible from Yahoo!'s stock quote pages and other areas of its site.

As the founder of Seeking Alpha, I want to provide some personal perspective on this event.

Stock market blogs have reached the point where traditional financial media companies can no longer ignore them. TheStreet.com, MarketWatch and even The Wall Street Journal now frequently link to blog posts from their websites. But the impact of stock market blogs has only just begun; micro-publishing will fundamentally change the face of financial publishing in two key ways:

1) Bloggers and direct submissions to Seeking Alpha will now provide analysis of thousands of stocks that were previously neglected. It's not economically viable for traditional media companies to hire journalists to cover small cap stocks, for example, so they tend to focus on the big, popular stocks like Apple, GM and Microsoft. But every small cap stock is owned by someone who wants to read about that stock. And someone probably has an informed opinion of that stock that they're happy to share in writing. So by providing a platform for investors and industry experts to distribute their opinion and analysis of stocks to a wide audience, Seeking Alpha enables vastly broader coverage of stocks than traditional media companies can provide.

2) Investors write differently than journalists. In the words of Seeking Alpha contributor Roger Nusbaum, "I think the big difference between the blogosphere and some of the monthly magazines is that where the monthlies provide a journalist's eye view of things... the blogosphere provides access to people that actually manage money, have managed money in the past or have otherwise had genuine success with investing. To me, that difference is huge."

Getting the Reader Experience Right

But an army of money-manager-bloggers is only half the story. Readers need help finding writers they can trust and value, and need a way to access content without scanning dozens of blogs regularly. Specifically, they need a single web site that offers:

• Assurance that what they're reading isn't spam or stock manipulation
• Assurance that what they're reading is high quality
• The ability to search for articles by ticker
• High editorial standards -- no typos, accurate titles, and on-topic writing
• Free delivery of articles via email, particularly to Blackberries, and ticker-based RSS feeds
• Navigation by sector and by theme
• Comprehensiveness that rounds out bloggers' articles with other must-read stock market material.

This is exactly what we're building on Seeking Alpha, because we're stock market junkies and it's what we wanted ourselves.

We select the most interesting articles from contributing bloggers and money managers who submit content to us directly, edit them to guarantee quality and consistency, and arrange and tag them. Then we round them out with a daily Wall Street Journal summary, a Barron's summary, a daily roundup of Jim Cramer's stock picks, coverage of new IPO filings, free conference call transcripts and a regular overview of what's going on in the housing market.

Then we place all that content on a web site optimized for stock market content. It offers a powerful free email service, RSS feeds by ticker, and navigation by sector, theme and ticker. And it allows contributors who don't have blogs to submit articles to us directly.

Exposure for Stock Market Bloggers and Money Managers

Our partnership with Yahoo! Finance proves that the combination of Seeking Alpha and an army of informed finance bloggers can change the face of financial publishing.

For Seeking Alpha's contributors and for bloggers in general, this is a big day. Our contributors write for a variety of reasons: to build their reputations, test their stock ideas in an interactive environment, demonstrate the quality of their stock picking or analytical skills, or to promote their newsletters, consulting practices or other businesses.

Our discussion with Yahoo! started from a simple premise: blogs link out, and on Seeking Alpha there's a link to the author in the first three words of every post that allows readers to discover the author's blog, business, resume, contact info -- or all of these.

Yahoo! understood this. Bloggers' posts therefore appear on Yahoo! Finance with exactly the same links that appear on Seeking Alpha. As a result, our contributors' articles, names, photos and links to their blogs or web sites will now be available to tens of millions of Yahoo! Finance readers, and they'll get more exposure and traffic than they ever dreamed of.

Welcome to the new world of financial publishing.

Best Wishes to the entire Seeking Alpha community of readers and contributors,

David Jackson
Founder, Seeking Alpha

Comments

[Travis Johnson:]

Congratulations to David and everyone at Seeking Alpha, that's a great accomplishment ... and I expect Yahoo's blog content to put Google Finance's blog section to shame, thanks to the SA editorial crew. I hope your servers are up to the challenge :)

Travis

2006 Sep 12 07:49 AM

[jolly singh:]

Great i love it

2006 Sep 12 07:49 AM

[Amit Chokshi:]

Congratulations to SA, it is well-deserved and definitely a sign of changing times for the better. Did anyone see the grilling the Yahoo Finance GM took today (9/12 around 7:30-8:00 am EST) on CNBC by Joe Kernan? She held up pretty well and it was a pretty pathetic attempt by CNBC to present SA as the equivalent of a Yahoo Finance Message Board. On one hand Joe and his colleague were speaking to the importance of due diligence and fact-checking when presenting stories on SA that will be linked to Yahoo Finance (to which the Yahoo Finance GM said there are over a dozen editors at SA) but it was painfully obvious those hypocrites had never visited SA based on their uninformed comments regarding the quality of the stories/articles on SA.

Funny how nobody has a problem with a fraud like Richard Kiyosaki having his own "financial advice" column on Yahoo but they'll take issue with content provided by investors/managers who have their own skin/careers/liveiliho... in the game and generally put out far more thoughtful analysis than Wall Street does. I guess CNBC realizes their Moneycentral website content is pretty stale with its Morningstar's best stocks which has invariably been touting the same stocks for years (PFE, WMT, MSFT, etc., no problem with those stocks except that the average investor probably has more than enough exposure to those through their mutual funds), Harry Domash's screening exercises, and model portfolio articles.

2006 Sep 12 09:40 AM

[Paul Meisel:]

This is one more important step in increasing the bandwidth of readily available information.

2006 Sep 12 09:49 AM

[mike f:]

Congrats to SA on the deal -- this is a great site. However the nature of aggregated blog postings is that you will have a spectrum of quality and integrity. While your staff is doing a good job selecting quality posts and authors, occasionally items sneak by with ridiculous speculations, bad research, whatever. It is a little disturbing to see these listed on YF side by side with factual items and news releases.

As an example, how can one post "The NYMEX Oil Market Is Being Manipulated" next to press releases? There needs to be some sort of division. That is not a shot at Phil, his is my favorite blog!

2006 Sep 12 02:02 PM

[David Taylor:]

David...

Just wanted to say thanks for all you great work. It's been a pleasure being a blogger on the SeekingAlpha Network.

David Andrew Taylor
dismally.com

2006 Sep 12 03:24 PM

[mike f:]

Don't want to keep harping on this, but to be constructive:

How can YF publish this unsubstantiated speculation:

"Now I'm not a weather forecaster, and even if I was the odds I'd be correct wouldn't be very high, but chances are good that we could have a colder winter this year."

On this page?!:

finance.yahoo.com/q?s=...;d=t

2006 Sep 12 08:39 PM

[globevestor...:]

Hi David,

Do you have to pay Yahoo?

Cheers

2007 Sep 13 05:27 AM

[Maxi:]

Congratulations for Seeking Alpha its a big achievement for them. And for Yahoo its another step to survive

2008 Sep 27 03:52 AM