Good morning!
This is just a quick note to get everyone on the same page for our Portal Project. Our goal is to create a new financial content aggregator that avoids the mistakes made by Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, etc. I wrote for Seeking Alpha for many years and it used to be good but now there's so much trash there that you can't find good articles anymore (my leaving was detailed on June 23rd).
Since then, I've met with several groups and, unfortunately, signed a few NDAs so I can't discuss much here but we're going to form our team and see what we can bring to the table to elevate the level of discussion in the Financial Community. The idea is to set up a content portal that attracts top-notch writers by A) Giving them a place where their work will be properly appreciated and B) Compensating them fairly. Did I mention B?
Yes, it's always about money and that's the gist of what SA did to the writers but Fool.com and the others do the same thing – they dangle carrots and tell writers they'll get paid for content but then it turns out to be only SOME content under CERTAIN circumstances, etc. and MOST of the writeres end up making little or nothing for their efforts.
That leads writers, even if they are good, to move on to other, more profitable ventures and it deprives the readers of quality content because the aggregators are more interested in enriching themselves than their readers – plain and simple! Also, I don't need to re-lecture you on the perverse relationship big business has with the press in this country!
Analytics are such these days, that we can set up an ad-based site that gives a portion of the revenues to each writer based on what they actually bring in. I know, it sounds stupidly simple – but no one is doing it! Why not? Greed. Of course, that's the problem, there's not much money in not being greedy – as I told our volunteers, we will be doing this for free and MAYBE, a long time from now, there will be a little money in it but it will always be a little because our goal is to create something that has the best content, not that makes the most money.
Maybe we'll luck out and find a combination that does both but I certainly don't want anyone putting in time thinking that's likely! There also won't be much money for the writers until we gain a little traction, so it's a labor of love all around but already we have a couple of hundred interested writers as well as some editors, web people programmers etc. and we're looking to add more to our team.
We will, of course, need everything from marketing people to ad sales people and, of course, lots of writers, web designers and editors and, if you haven't written before – this will be a good time to try! I'd rather read what the people in our chat room have to say than 99% of the "authors" featured on other sites. Let's aim to give a real voice to people who have specific industry knowledge and give them a platform to let their opinions be heard.
Our volunteers so far are Newt, Biodeselchris, Pharmboy, Scottmi, QCMike, StJeanLuc, Rperi, Deano, Shadowfax, Bdonnelley713, Eric_s and AriveraA and, of course, Ilene, Matt, Greg, Tina, the other PSW writers, editors and I will be putting our time in as well. If I missed you, simply add your name in comments below and, for all of you, please state HOW you think you can best contribute to this project and let us know a little about your backgrounds. Thanks!
Deano has suggested we try raising some capital via kickstarter and, of course, money would be nice to have as there are real expenses running the site that need to be paid as well as certain key positions (managing editor, marketing director) that are full-time and need to be filled if we want to be serious about this.
Ultimately, TastyTrade shows us how quickly and easily you can build up a revenue-producing model but, keep in mind, they were well-financed to begin with (some of the old TOS team took their AMTD money and built a channel. I've had discussions with SIRI about doing a Sirius Stocks© Channel and I've also thought of doing a sort of Financial version of the Daily Show but, first things first and we need to build a name and some content and THEN we can get ambitious!
Thanks for all your help on this exciting project.
– Phil
