Yahoo Finance Embraces Blogs -- Reactions

Seeking Alpha's announcement late last night that it would be providing blog content for Yahoo! Finance (YHOO) was met with a range of responses, both in more traditional media outlets and throughout the blogosphere.

Following are excerpts and links to those comments:

• Roger Nusbaum: 'From the start I have been saying the blogosphere would evolve to take in more people, more outlets and more sophisticated content... Another big implication, I believe, will be to draw in many more readers than currently seek out blogs for information. This will create a couple of clear and obvious benefits. First will be more great questions and comments. More evolution along these lines makes the experience better for readers and bloggers alike. Further this will draw new entrants into the blogosphere. Think about your favorite blogs. How many are only a year old? There will be new blogs that come that will be must reads for all of us.'
• The Washington Post: 'Yahoo enhanced its finance site with a Web log that compiles posts from portfolio managers, hedge fund managers and other finance professionals. Starting today, users looking up stocks on the site will have access to analysis submitted by more than 200 finance experts posted by Seeking Alpha, a publisher of stock market opinion and analysis. Yahoo is making the change to help counter Google, which has links to Web logs on its Google Finance Web site.'
• Howard Lindzon: 'What I see is Yahoo keeping a possible enemy close but not threatened enough to buy. Too big and clunky... 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!'
• Michael Eisenberg, general partner at Benchmark Capital: 'Seeking Alpha has a disruptive business model that could revolutionize the financial content industry and generate enormous exposure for money managers, newsletter authors and consultants. We believe that success in online publishing requires a deep understanding of and passion for the vertical in which a company operates, and we found those qualities in the stock-market-obsessed Seeking Alpha team. Their passion comes through in the quality and breadth of content they offer, and will serve as a catalyst for investors to explore the wealth of financial knowledge, analysis and insight that is now available to them online.'
• James Enck: 'My thesis has always remained that the mindshare of bloggers and other independent opinion shapers inevitably would collectively overwhelm the walled gardens which are brokers' research products. The expertise "out there" is just too great, and the analysis too frank, to be ignored - and it grows daily into something I like to call "open source analysis." I have argued that investment banking research, to remain relevant, would have to adopt the same tools and approach, to create a "point of presence" in this new ecosystem, indeed to create a Media 2.0 profile for its analysts. It's no longer enough to go on CNBC looking buff and hyperconfident... For the fund manager or independent investor who hasn't had the time, stamina, or knowledge to amass and keep up with a long list of RSS feeds on a wide range of issues, having a trusted aggregator of independent voices within an already trusted and familiar source of financial news and data poses more than a trivial challenge to the brokers for gaining and holding one's attention.'
• Asif Suria: 'This is a huge win for SeekingAlpha, their contributors and bloggers in general, who have often been looked down upon by traditional media. Regarding your comment about "giving megaphones to nutters at virtual street corners", SA does edit the content and from what I see on my blog, they only pick up certain posts. Hence I expect the quality of content from SA that shows up on Yahoo Finance to be good.'
• Matt Marshall, VentureBeat: 'By putting the bloggers on a par with Dow Jones, Street.com and other mainstream sources, Jackson thinks Seeking Alpha will encourage even more bloggers to participate. Seeking Alpha’s aggregated content may soon dwarf the content produced by mainstream sites, the thinking goes. So now you are getting the full image — the image of that revolutionary, proverbial long tail. “We’re tapping into the long tail,” Says Jackson referring, to the long line of contributors with a good opinion about stocks he thinks will transform analyst coverage of mid- and small-cap companies that newspapers and other sources don’t have the resources to cover. '
• Carl Howe: 'Open analysis relies upon a large pool of expert analysts who sift and analyze news events, stocks, and strategies, for their own businesses. That pool of content is then itself graded, sorted, and organized into a single, branded site such as SeekingAlpha.com (and, as of today, Yahoo Finance)... This approach contrasts with traditional business coverage that relies on a set of select journalists who can only cover the biggest stories of the day. Because a traditional publication can only afford to support a limited number of journalists, economics forces it to pre-select the topics it considers worthy of analysis. And that pre-selection often misses big opportunities and bigger stories brewing in less covered subjects... But there's a dark side too, that I mentioned in the beginning. Open analysis adds to the tyranny of too much content... Ironically, as we've been given more choices on the Internet, the more we've turned to a very small number of content aggregators -- companies like Google and Yahoo -- to overcome the tyranny of too much.'
• Dominic Jones, IR Web Report: 'With the Yahoo! Finance initiative, Seeking Alpha’s blog contributors now have access to a much larger audience of up 10 million users. Recent research by Thomson Financial and others suggests that Yahoo! Finance is arguably the most influential resource among investment professionals and retail investors alike... By including blog posts in its information mix, Yahoo! Finance is giving investors access to new and different perspectives on companies they own or are interested in... You might want to check Yahoo! Finance for any blog opinions about your company.'
• Crain's New York Business: 'The move illustrates how financial blogs are rapidly maturing into a business that's starting to interest large media companies. More than 12 million people visit Yahoo Finance every month.'
• Red Herring.com: 'New York-based Seeking Alpha, a provider of online stock market opinion and analysis, will provide links to its blogs from money managers, finance professionals, and industry experts through the Yahoo Finance site. “The No. 1 objective at Yahoo Finance is to help our users make informed financial decisions, and Seeking Alpha significantly expands the information we provide to our audience,” Peggy White, general manager of Yahoo Finance, said in a statement. She believes the content will give Yahoo Finance users a different perspective by providing commentary from various experts in the financial industry.'
• Andrew Schmidt: 'As many of you know, I do all of my web development and administration personally. It is a labor of love. I migrated to a higher capacity web hosting service last week based on the traffic generated by the Cisco post. It’s a good thing I did. Last night, when the Seeking Alpha agreement went live, this site hit a new traffic record based on interest in Intel and Cortina, and it was led by referrers from the new Yahoo linkage.'
• Paid Content.org: 'Seeking Alpha’s heavy emphasis on live editing played a large role in the agreement, says founder and CEO David Jackson. The filter added by editing allows SA to guard for stock manipulation and spam...Yahoo appears to become an extension of the network in this regard, carrying everything on Yahoo Finance but the transcripts.'
• Ant & Sons: 'Ant & Sons is pleased with the announcement, especially since analysis of thousands of stocks, from large to micro cap, that are sometimes overlooked or simply not covered can now be seen and read by the millions of visitors that Yahoo Finance attracts each day. Investors will finally be enriched with knowledge from some of the best financial content providers.'
• Paul Kedrosky: '[The deal] represent[s] a further step in the democratization of financial media and equity analysis -- call it the attack of the billion-footed blog beast. SeekingAlpha is the hub of an ad hoc federation of financial blogs, one that pulls content from a host of sites, including this one. But bloggers still own their commentary, and more importantly, it is now syndicated to a high-traffic financial portal, Yahoo Finance, with blog source linkage intact. It is, in a sense, free advertising (i.e., traffic) for bloggers. Some will carp that we're giving megaphones to nutters at virtual street corners, which is true at the margin. But far more important is that David is giving a big platform to people who richly deserve more exposure. Yes, it won't be easy to make this work, and the opportunities for self-interested behaviors are legion, but the direction is one to watch. Congrats to David [Jackson] for pulling this off.'
• Barry Ritholtz, the Big Picture: 'I was getting dressed this morning when the head of Yahoo Finance was being interviewed by Joe Kernan on CNBC about their deal to carry Seeking Alpha on the Yahoo site. It was apparent from the questioning that there is not a whole lot of understanding about blogs and what they do from the MSM. Yahoo! in general, and Yahoo Finance in particular, have been enormous content aggregators. Seeking Alpha very effectively organizes, assembles and filters many different financial bloggers. It was a natural fit -- just like Yahoo! was with Marketwatch and TheStreet.com. It's what they do'.

Press Release: Seeking Alpha Blog Content Now Available on Yahoo! Finance

Comments

[Kris Tuttle:]

As a user I can say that Seeking Alpha has done some things that make it the best initiative so far in this space. The first is that they put a layer of editorial judgement and content on top of raw submissions. This combines some of the control features of Slashdot with group dynamic of Reddit.

Google blogs tend to be very dormant and hard to look at or follow at least as I have tried to use them.

It's early in the game but this is the first solution that I have found that works in the financial publishing and analysis space.

2006 Sep 15 08:48 AM