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

kennethfine

6 years ago
updated 5 years ago
Completed

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:

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.
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....
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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Crabpaws

6 years ago

The paywall and 10-day limit on articles very much reduce the value of SeekingAlpha to the occasional researcher who is not a subscriber, thus constricting the universe of those who might become regular readers or subscribers.

As I said elsewhere, if I'm Googling something and frequently run into a paywall at a site, such as Barron's, I just don't bother to click on it. (A Barron's subscription is less than $250/yr, they run frequent specials for a lot less, and the columnists are, arguably, more reliable.)

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I feel a little odd commenting here when marketing plans have already defined target segments, made projections, and analyzed competition.

The bottom line is: How does Seeking Alpha differentiate from its competition, what is the value-add that justifies a subscription that's so much more expensive? Devotion of the community will only go so far, as probably the majority cannot afford $900/year.

-1

Warren Longstockings

Quote from 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!

HumbleAllocator,

I'm curious because I'm searching for new communities, what is M*?

M. Washburn

Quote from 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.

This was my point. I was literally about to subscribe to a different marketplace service as I ended the previous one in January. To me,if you subscribe to a marketplace service then you should get access to the articles for longer. Holding off on signing up.

stocksman99

Wow, this article sums up exactly what I was thinking. The comments area is the most valuable commodity of Seeking Alpha. Only the free model will keep this flow of information intact. I think Seeking Alpha has a huge Unintentional Consequence here. Here they have people giving them free content on their site (via comments), and now want to charge them. I love the comments, they shoot holes in the articles, and sometimes people give you better stock picks. Really valuable. I would not subscribe now for that reason, not just the money, but the depleted and ruined comments areas will make Seeking Alpha less valuable to me.

Its not about how much. Any subscription model will ruin the comments area on Seeking Alpha.

I have sent a request to SA subscriptions to cancel two out of the three Marketplace subscriptions that I'm currently signed up for, and have requested a pro-rated refund of my unused subscription time per the terms that were in force when I signed up for them. Being a classy and professional organization, I have no doubt that SA will issue my refund expeditiously. This cancellation is a direct response to the new paywall. As I explained in my cancellation note:

"The two marketplace subscriptions I wish to cancel both cover smaller issues. I liked that I could try to research those stocks at the time of my signup, and the SA ecosystem supported that. It doesn’t now, and it isn’t clear what form or price point SA will take next week, next month, next year. I’ll put this money to better use with other investment services."

This new plan will hurt people that were already subscribers, as the comments on the articles will all dry up. Would not be surprised to see a new website created to take advantage of all the seeking alpha refugees. I will repeat, its not just about the Paywall, but the effect it will have on the content on the site. Less comments = less content. They may start to lose previous subscribers like you because this, because the drying up of comments will affect them too! Paywalls also block search engines = less traffic.

Quote from kennethfine

Thanks Marc. Hopefully SA does the right thing and reconsiders this. The first effect of this change will be a massive drop in the number of quality comments on SA, followed by a gradual loss of interest and engagement by the user community. Once upon a time, The Motley Fool at fool.com had a really vital discussion community: that's mostly gone. I don't want to see that process repeated here.

There is nothing extraordinary about SA's web application platform in terms of its technology. A small team or consultancy at Microsoft could replicate all of SA technologywise and improve on it in a week or less. The chat rooms, the access-controlled posts and areas, the WYSIWIG online editing, the tracking, the metrics, the paywalls, the portfolios, the search (such as it is), the user identity system that tracks and persists occasional anonymous users into permanently-tracked accounts, the association of arbitrary data with anonymous and registered user accounts, the flexible relational data store, the transactional replication of cloud-based database entries and files to a locally-controlled server and database server, the 24/7 massively redundant hosting in the cloud. One week.

The really interesting thing SA has going for itself isn't technology, it's a community of engaged writers, readers, commenters. Build community please.

I was thinking the same thing....creating a site like this is not rocket science. Someone will create another community and bring in those that have left this one. Its all about the community, not the articles. If you lose 90% of the community, then you have lost everything, and your competitors will pick up the slack.

user 34475785

I guess that I have been visiting SA for about 5 years and suspect that I am typical of many visitors to this site. I have the following comments which are not fully on point. First, there is nothing that I have ever read on these pages that I would ever pay for. A lot of it is worthless, a lot of it is erroneous, some of it is amusing and a very small amount of it is worthwhile. most of which is contained in the commentary section. The new "10 day rule" is annoying but would rarely affect me and I could live with it. So I am not as upset as the above posters. On the other hand, if SA is going to evolve into a "pay" model then I will be saying good by.

Secondly, I am surprised that no one is complaining about the web site itself. I have been having a lot of trouble with how the SA web site shows itself on my computer. This started about 3 months ago and has been getting progressively worse and worse. It has gotten to the point where I have been looking for alternatives to obtain basic financial information because there are so many problems that the site is almost impossible for me to view. My laptop is less than a year old and I use it exclusively for regular and business news; so I seriously doubt that this is a problem with my equipment.

update: seekingalpha to its credit did cancel my subscriptions without argument and said it would issue a prorated refund to my credit card for the unused subscription time. I retain one marketplace subscription that is less dependent on the article archive. Hopefully in the future SA leadership will think carefully about how the marketplace subscriptions can be bundled somehow to the archive of articles.