Paid archive: how SA will kill the vitality of comments and community. FIX

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kennethfine
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After thinking on this a few days, I've concluded SA is making a massive mistake with its paid article archive. Please backtrack before you totally wreck what's good about SA. A few issues:


  1. The best feature of SA is ongoing reader comments on its articles, as company news changes  and a thesis is proven or disproven. You're basically killing the vitality of that. Once people get out of the habit of making informed comment on articles they can read and continue to read, they will not go back.  
  2. Seventy five dollars a month is too much. Thirty dollars a month is too much. I say that as someone who subscribes to three SA Marketplace services, and I've paid as much as $300 a month for single SA Marketplace services in the past. I might pay a token $10 or $20 a year for archive access, because without a vital comment stream.... 
  3. ... the SA archive really isn't that valuable at all. It's mostly old news and old speculation that goes on to be proven or disproven in time. The truly astute or comprehensive article is quite rare, probably less than 1% of articles would be publishable in traditional sources. I certainly wouldn't rely on the SA archive to reliably give me a "deep dive into less-followed companies" or other marketingspeak. That's frankly wishful. 
  4. What was previously good about SA was that almost ANYONE could write and publish quickly. Previously you had choruses of voices weighing in on a stock, some professional, some amateur, some astute, some not-so-astute: many points of view. Readers could read everyone's take and reach their own conclusions. Now there is no ability to compare and no competing voices  from the archive.
  5. As a marketplace subscriber to three services, I am frankly ticked off that you would abruptly lock me out of the archive, as well as hiding the articles I've taken the time to comment thoughtfully about. I've supported SA for a long time, and your thanks to me for this support is to ambush me with a change that breaks SA's entire model. 
  6. As a consumer I do not like it when companies break trust with their longtime customers. Not long ago Evernote pulled a similar stunt: massively jacking up subscription prices and breaking the longstanding paradigm of "Your data on your devices."  I had used Evernote for seven years and was a subscriber and fan. In one afternoon I pulled all of my data out of Evernote and put it into Microsoft OneNote; I haven't been back since. Users lost often don't come back once they lose patience. Your format and your platform is replicable. 
  7. In addition to reversing this ill-conceived policy, SA leadership should consider meeting to craft a small-scale "SA Commmunity Bill of Rights" to help guide future policy, and give angry and future members of the community of what you generally will and will not do. The businessfolk in you probably bristle at the idea of handing any sense of control to the rabble -- after all, this is your property to monetize -- but "community" cuts two ways. If you want it, you can't just dictate to it, you have to appreciate it and grow it. Places like Facebook have little sayings and mini lists of users rights: one of Facebook's taglines is: "it's free and it always will be". If you're going to ask people to make a commitment of time to your community, you need to give a better sense of what they're buying into. 
  8. Finally, if an issue driving this change is mobile ad revenue, or ad revenue generally, it may be partly because your mobile application(s) need a lot of help. They do only a subset of what the website can do, including frankly basic things like offering an integrated SA Marketplace chat. One user in one of our groups reports there is a separate "SA Chat" app, but he also reports that it was eating 10 gigabytes of cache data. Android users can enable "Desktop Mode" to get some functionality of the SA website back on their phones, but I have not found a way to persist this setting as I navigate between pages and articles: I'm continually led back to the lame mobile app. Many kids these days just don't use desktop or notebook computers that much, and an online property that doesn't do mobile is disadvantaged. 
Replies 67
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-1
David Jackson
Quote from Guy at Work reading SA

I'll re post in the hope you'll respond to it.  It seems that your response above does indeed say the new revenue is offsetting the decline in readers.


David, the most important data will not be received in the time you are
expecting it. You will think the drop in traffic, comments, new reads,
will be initially offset by the revenue generated but the hard hit will
come later as your base will slowly leave as the site deteriorates.
Quality comments will be lost from your base, the ones that have built
your site, do not be foolish thinking this site cannot be replicated
technologically very easily. Authors will leave as their audience
dwindles. All the points as to why this will not work are listed above, I
just think this is the way it will play out and I hope you revert back
to old articles being free.


It seems you've decided to keep the model the way it is, changing the pricing as needed, and unfortunately I think the platform you initially set out to create has turned into something completely different. Stock holders (readers in this case) do not like to see a business fundamentally change the way it operates, they like consistency with as little uncertainty as possible.

Guy at Work, thank you for your reply. I've read your original post. As I said in my post above, "My goal is to listen carefully to the feedback here and elsewhere with an open mind. So please forgive me if I don't express any opinions about the issues raised here and in other threads" at this point.

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Guy at Work reading SA
Quote from David Jackson

Guy at Work, thank you for your reply. I've read your original post. As I said in my post above, "My goal is to listen carefully to the feedback here and elsewhere with an open mind. So please forgive me if I don't express any opinions about the issues raised here and in other threads" at this point.

Thanks for the reply, I hope for the best for this site as it has helped me endlessly!

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-1
David Jackson
Quote from Crabpaws

It looks like the intention is to turn SeekingAlpha into a entirely different product, one that is for a more elite audience that is probably smaller but more profitable in membership fees. They will cull out the less-popular columnists and pay the rest more.


The customer base is the more dedicated investment DIY-ers, finance hobbyists, and maybe investment advisers not above cribbing from others' research. There will be fewer clueless commenters. A smaller contributor and reader base may also mean reduction in staffing and expense.


$900/year gets you the ability to research among the archives and the curated columnists. If you only use SA occasionally, say every quarter when you rebalance, I presume you can pay $75 for only a month's access.


Running ahead of subscriptions sales projections does not mean great numbers of sign-ups, it means SA is hitting its projected revenue target for this business plan.


It's a business, not a community.


So long, and thanks for all the CEFs.

Crabpaws, thank you for your response. Happy to clarify the issues you raised:


1. We're not looking to change Seeking Alpha into "a more elite audience that is probably smaller but more profitable in membership fees." On the contrary, growing our subscription revenue will allow us to publish more and better articles for all our users. We want a larger audience, not a "smaller reader base".


2. Seeking Alpha is not looking to "reduce staffing or expenses", and isn't in any sort of financial crisis. We probably contributed to that misperception by the wording "Please support Seeking Alpha", and our recent communication with contributors in which we said we wanted better control of our payments for articles, instead of having our content expenses determined by unpredictable traffic flows to the website. The issue is strategic: we don't want to be reliant on advertising alone, because it doesn't provide sufficient financial visibility and strength for us to keep improving our product and raising our payments to contributors, and it faces headwinds from ad blockers and Google and Facebook's dominance.


3. We don't plan to "cull out the less-popular columnists and pay the rest more." Paying for popularity is one of the consequences of an advertising-only business model. It's why other finance websites cover popular large caps, but are thin or have nothing on less popular stocks. Value in finance (the ability to beat the market) is often inversely correlated with popularity. That's why subscriptions are so important to us: when investors pay for value not populism, we can turn round and pass that value on to our contributors.


4. We care a lot about our community, not only about our business. That's why we designed a paywall to impact the minority of pageviews, because the vast majority of article reads and comments occur within 10 days of publication. I understand, though, how the $75/month price point would lead you to the opposite conclusion. At this point I won't say more about that.

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-1
RealRural

I somehow missed the memo about the use changes at SA. Was there an email? I think SA better needs to spell out how and why this happened, both for marketing and PR common-sense. (I'm a journalist and do marketing as well). The link should be front and center on the site and every link. This is basic marketing and user friendliness.


  I am an avid user and apparently (I only scanned the posts above) you are now charging to see older posts? I discovered this when I went back to check comments on  some threads I wrote on and discovered the article was now blocked. I clicked on the "Pro" option to see what was involved and the price was $30 a month. There is no clear explanation what this Pro option allows one to do nor explanation about how the previous system worked and why the change is needed. This is a failure of communication that hurts SA.


IMO, putting older archives behind a pay wall makes it worthless to leave comments when you don't remember what the article said going back and can't look at it again - which is what I was trying to do. I knew I had read the article and was surprised I could not read it now. Unanswered is the question: Can I read it for a certain number of days or not at all? It is not clear. Again, SA is not doing a good job of explaining this. 


My own feeling is $30 a month is way too much and you're going to kill traffic. That is $360 a year, a lot of money for some of us.I would suggest a more forward-looking  "membership model" where EVERYONE subscribes to

use the site at a much lower cost. Much more user-friendly, and accommodative to a larger group and a system that fosters buy-in.


I might pay $5 a month to be a member to sustain the website site, and my feeling is you'll get more people to sign up and more users and the same revenue if you shoot for numbers instead of a higher price based per month.


Thanks for listening.

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kennethfine

David: the paywall will affect the community and the conversation in some ways that will not be easily measured.   


One effect will be to sharply limit or eliminate the possibility of contributions of comments by what I will call "serendipitously appearing experts". An example of this was software engineering superstar John Carmack of iD software fame (_Wolfenstein 3d_, _Doom_, _Quake_) famously dropping  by and posting highly technical discussions to Slashdot's article comments in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Carmack wasn't a usual Slashdot participant, but he did contribute meaningfully to a few conversations about programming, game development, and 3D rendering. More recently, Quora has become a Thing as very famous people drop by to directly answer questions people ask about them. The analogy on SA would be if a company executive, company scientist, investor relations person, or other industry expert happened on a conversation attached to an SA  article, and decided they might contribute usefully to it. Chances are that someone in a position of influence will probably not even see a pertinent article in the 10 day window, seeing as they have many other things competing for their attention. Chances are a company executive or leading scientist is not going to subscribe to SA at any price point: they have other more remunirative stuff to do. The only chance you have to capture their input for the good of the community is by capturing their attention and minimizing the friction required for them to post. By paywalling your content, you basically become invisible to these potential contributors.  


Another effect of paywall will be to limit discussion to what's in the present. A common thing in comments was to refer to someone else's articles or thesis elsewhere on SA. People aren't going to do that if they know that most readers won't be able to follow the link. The community will have much less of a common memory and a common vocabulary in SA. 

 

Another effect of paywall is that you are locking in a particular mode of use for both articles and the comments feature, and discarding the possibility of innovation, growth, or unexpectedly awesome new uses of these features. You state that the vast majority of article reads and comments occur within 10 days of publication ... therefore, the 10 day paywall ... therefore the vast majority of article reads and comments *will* occur within 10 days of publication. It's a self-fulfilling and self-limiting prophecy, enforced by the paywall. The behavior is locked. The problem with locking behavior in this way is that time and time again, online user communities have used intended feature sets in totally unexpected ways, and some of these ways prove to be altogether more interesting and valuable than the original design intent. Read about YouTube's early days for an excellent example of users ultimately doing more interesting things with the tool than what was intended or designed for. It is difficult to presuppose and pre-imagine all of the editorial forms that might be created in the future, and how comments and user contributions might play into those forms and formats. 


SA's taking more of a "walled garden" approach, and that is your right: it's your property. But the uncertainties about how open and available SA will be in the future will have a chilling effect on the community. I know that I'm already finding myself a lot less inclined to expend time and energy on comments that will quickly lose attachment to any useful context. Seeking Alpha sort of seems all over the map regarding what form it will take in the future, how much of that will be visible to me, and how much I'll have to pay to play. I prefer my relationships to have some consistency. 

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0
coroscant72
Quote from kennethfine

David: the paywall will affect the community and the conversation in some ways that will not be easily measured.   


One effect will be to sharply limit or eliminate the possibility of contributions of comments by what I will call "serendipitously appearing experts". An example of this was software engineering superstar John Carmack of iD software fame (_Wolfenstein 3d_, _Doom_, _Quake_) famously dropping  by and posting highly technical discussions to Slashdot's article comments in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Carmack wasn't a usual Slashdot participant, but he did contribute meaningfully to a few conversations about programming, game development, and 3D rendering. More recently, Quora has become a Thing as very famous people drop by to directly answer questions people ask about them. The analogy on SA would be if a company executive, company scientist, investor relations person, or other industry expert happened on a conversation attached to an SA  article, and decided they might contribute usefully to it. Chances are that someone in a position of influence will probably not even see a pertinent article in the 10 day window, seeing as they have many other things competing for their attention. Chances are a company executive or leading scientist is not going to subscribe to SA at any price point: they have other more remunirative stuff to do. The only chance you have to capture their input for the good of the community is by capturing their attention and minimizing the friction required for them to post. By paywalling your content, you basically become invisible to these potential contributors.  


Another effect of paywall will be to limit discussion to what's in the present. A common thing in comments was to refer to someone else's articles or thesis elsewhere on SA. People aren't going to do that if they know that most readers won't be able to follow the link. The community will have much less of a common memory and a common vocabulary in SA. 

 

Another effect of paywall is that you are locking in a particular mode of use for both articles and the comments feature, and discarding the possibility of innovation, growth, or unexpectedly awesome new uses of these features. You state that the vast majority of article reads and comments occur within 10 days of publication ... therefore, the 10 day paywall ... therefore the vast majority of article reads and comments *will* occur within 10 days of publication. It's a self-fulfilling and self-limiting prophecy, enforced by the paywall. The behavior is locked. The problem with locking behavior in this way is that time and time again, online user communities have used intended feature sets in totally unexpected ways, and some of these ways prove to be altogether more interesting and valuable than the original design intent. Read about YouTube's early days for an excellent example of users ultimately doing more interesting things with the tool than what was intended or designed for. It is difficult to presuppose and pre-imagine all of the editorial forms that might be created in the future, and how comments and user contributions might play into those forms and formats. 


SA's taking more of a "walled garden" approach, and that is your right: it's your property. But the uncertainties about how open and available SA will be in the future will have a chilling effect on the community. I know that I'm already finding myself a lot less inclined to expend time and energy on comments that will quickly lose attachment to any useful context. Seeking Alpha sort of seems all over the map regarding what form it will take in the future, how much of that will be visible to me, and how much I'll have to pay to play. I prefer my relationships to have some consistency. 

Kennethfine - I have already seen the walls in action.  I have read two articles today that referenced other articles from the recent past where they are presenting a counter point of view. Unfortunately, in both  instances,  the articles referenced happened more than 10 days in the past and would now constitute a "Deep Dive" by the new standards.  It is not difficult to see that it might take more than 10 days to gather and write a coherent counterpoint to a point of view.  I expect this will vastly limit growth of users, because even if you manage to draw in a fresh user, the user will not be able to read the original article anyway, will get frustrated, and will just move on to a more user friendly environment that is sure to pop up. 


Your "Wall" analogy is a good one.  They may try and wall in quite a few of the current users, but in doing so they will wall out all new users.  Unfortunately for Seeking Alpha, numbers will look good in the short term, but they will not know that they have bled to death until it is to late fix the problem. 

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HumbleAllocator

kennethfine posts are dead on. Agree 100%. 


I pay $25 per month to M* for much deeper and cleaner analysis but did like the alternative format and user comments SA provided.  


However if the walled off past articles for a fee is not reversed, I will probably just subscribe to the outside services a few of the authors/analysts I most like provide such as Brad Thomas Forbes RE and stop using SA entirely.


$75 per month is not a good value.  $10/mo maybe


Way to SUCK SA!



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2
RealRural

KennethFine, an excellent point I had not thought of about the wonderful serendipity of experts dropping by to make insightful comments. I often see those and highly value when a telecom engineer, say, drops in on VZ or AT&T articles, or a doctor adds his 2 cents to a discussion on medical office buildings, for example. Losing this is very counter-productive. The 10-days limit is subtle ways blows everything up.


Coming from the journalism sector, the issue of "paywalls" is fraught. With a wall you can vanish entirely from Google News and drop off the Web, as it were. Here it will weaken research and browsing the site. Again, I think a far wiser approach is a membership model, sort of like a co-op, where you join to support the community at a modest monthly fee that restores the old system; if you want more, then you go Pro.


Obviously, I don't know SA $$ numbers or member ##s and how it all sugars off but I urge SA to run those numbers and see how it works out as a membership. Let's not ruin what is a highly successful, innovative crowd-sourced investment site. And put the numbers out there for us to see. Or even offer some choices for the readership, as many organizations do when changing a "dues" or funding structure. ,

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1
_Camillo_

I am new to this community but even to a beginners like me it doesn't take much to recognize the value of SA is ALL about the community, the comments and the discourse it generates. 


How this paywall makes any sense with SA culture?


Moreover you are locking up comments people made FOR FREE which usually are more valuable then the article itself? With which right you are doing that?


Moreover the pro monthly rate it does not make any sense to access an archive.


Really disappointed by such a change.

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3
khart100

I currently subscribe to a Marketplace service that costs $1,000 per year and provides quantitative analysis on virtually every stock worldwide. It is a great tool to find stocks that meet their criteria using a wide range of formulas, calculations, etc. However, it doesn't provide a deep dive on what each of the companies does, and realistically, how could they provide that on every stock. So it is up to me to do that after narrowing down the field.


I had been using this tool to find companies, many obscure and not widely known or covered, then reading about previous analysis done on them on SA. Since many of these are not widely covered, I will never find the article within the first 10 days. Now I no longer have access to these old articles. While the old articles may have provided outdated financial analysis, they often explained what the company did better than what you can gather from the companies own websites, who the competitors are, general information about the industry they are in, etc.


I can't justify paying another $900 per year for access to these old articles on top of what I'm already paying for the Marketplace service. I can say with certainty that at this point I will not be renewing my service next year unless something changes with the pricing structure. 


Why not have a much reduced price for those that subscribe to a Marketplace service (maybe $10/month)? This gives a benefit to those that have supported the authors previously and now and would probably incentivize some to sign up for a Marketplace service to get the reduced rate.


I regret even signing up for the service at this point. I wouldn't have done so had I known that a valuable tool that I saw as a necessary complimentary piece would be hidden behind a paywall just a couple months later. I feel duped and am upset at the utter lack of communication surrounding this whole thing.