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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5
M. Washburn

Great note.  I am seeking alternatives to seeking Alpha.  i think this is not a good move to look out articles after a few days.  
i was looking to subscribe to another service on seeking Alpha but have to now have to reconsider.  


Hey seeking Alpha, how about a compromise.  if you subscribe to a paid service on seeking alpha then you have access to public articles and comments.  

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-1
mdavi

totally agree. $75/month sounds greedy to say the least, going from free just a short while ago. Wasn't the whole point of this website that it's for main street and not wall street? Time to look for an alternative if this is the way it's going to be

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2
David Jackson

I just want to thank everyone for your feedback. Eli and I decided to listen instead of responding immediately. Some clear messages have come through. I hope to update you soon with the next steps we're planning to take.

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3
kennethfine

Since someone in SA appears to actually be listening to this feedback, here's a couple of other points that I posted yesterday to the chat room in Richard Lejeune's "Panick High Yield Report." The item about pump-and-dump defense is particularly important.


  • The SA archive served as a defense against stock promoters and pump-and-dump-ists: a reader could compare how a new article's contentions squared with older articles. Astute readers could also note the pattern of an author who wrote repeatedly and with excessive praise about a particular company. That ability to compare is gone now, and newer investors will be more easily fleeced.

  •  The value of the SA archive isn't so much as a means of doing "deep dives on underfollowed companies" so much as an essential bullshit check on a platform that basically allows anyone to write about anything.



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-2
Crabpaws

I believe it's exactly that value for research that SA wants to monetize. Ingenious, given that much of the SA archive is mulch.

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2
Guy at Work reading SA
Quote from David Jackson

It's not. We're reading and considering all the feedback, and also looking carefully at the data -- the number of sign ups for PRO and any changes to usage on the site.

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.


As the name suggests I am not a professional investor and cannot afford $900 a year to research my small portfolio. You will lose me as the site deteriorates unless you keep this amazing site the way it was. We were all very happy about this site and praised it endlessly for its unique community. For the site to be operational you may have to generate some more earnings, we realize how business works, but to pay $900 a year to read old articles is ridiculous.


Lastly I'll compare you to my largest holding (which I read articles on here about), QCOM  (SA). QCOM is in a battle with its largest customer Apple (readers on your site).  As a result qcom's share price has been depressed and hostile AVGO (the new SA) is now trying to takeover a weakened qcom.  I'm not a fortune teller and cannot tell you if picking a fight with your largest customer is a good idea or not, only time will tell.

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-1
David Jackson

Since there are overlapping forum areas on this topic, I wanted to share an answer to a question I received in another thread:


The question, from trude017mil was: "David, I'd be curious to know if you have gotten any takers and if new paying member numbers have been above, below or about what you expected? But more important than that, I hope you guys seriously consider the many points presented here, the likely death of comments, SEO impact from reduced comments & tons of content that will no longer be indexed, likely loss of users due to pissed off member base, PPC impact from all of the above... Like I said initially, I love SA and truly do wish you well and continued success!"


My reply:


trude017mil, thank you for your question, and particularly for the kindness and civility with which it was expressed. 


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, and limit myself to giving you the data you requested:


1. Signups for PRO have far exceeded our expectations, and there is no sign yet that the sign up rate is slowing. At the current sign up rate, we will be able to pay our contributors more, and increasingly reward them for value rather than pageviews. Paying our contributors more should enable us to increase the quality and quantity of articles for both paying subscribers and non-subscribers who read articles in the first 10 days after publication.


2. We're not seeing a concerning reduction in the number of comments. This is because the vast majority of comments are written within the first 10 days of an article's life. Of the relatively small percentage of comments left after 10 days, many of them are written by people who already commented in the first 10 days. Our analysis of the readership and comment data was the basis for fixing the paywall at 10 days, and ensuring that people who have already commented on an article are able to view the comments and add further comments even after the article is behind the paywall. While it's obviously not optimal to comment on an article when you can no longer see it, a significant percentage of new comments on older articles discuss the stock more than the article itself. We did a gradual rollout of the paywall to check that these comment patterns didn't change due to the paywall, and so far we're seeing no change at full rollout.


3. We took a number of steps to mitigate any impact to SEO, and so far we're not seeing any signs of damage to search traffic. Our search traffic just hit an all time high, and our contributors are reaching a larger readership than ever before and will receive larger payments.


4. We haven't seen a meaningful decline in article reads, nor a spike in account cancellations. That's probably due to the fact that the paywall only impacts "primary ticker articles" after 10 days, leaving the vast majority of Seeking Alpha usage intact. Canceling an account would mean that a user would lose real time news coverage, transcripts, analysis and email alerts on their stocks, when none of those have been affected by the paywall.

This doesn't necessarily mean we've got the product and pricing right. I'd like to continue to listen to your and others' feedback with an open mind, so at this stage I'll avoid drawing conclusions from this data. But I'd welcome your and others' reactions to it. 

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1
anonymous

David, I believe that Eli stated that Seeking Alpha was founded to democratise equity research. Now you are making users pay to access an archive of crowd sourced equity research, as well as past earnings call transcripts. This seems to go against what I thought was the philosophy of this website. Thank you for pointing out to us that SA has not suffered as a result of this - in time I am fairly certain that this will kill SA off, however the point is that by making this move you have destroyed most of what this website stood for. 

Avatar
-2
Guy at Work reading SA
Quote from David Jackson

Since there are overlapping forum areas on this topic, I wanted to share an answer to a question I received in another thread:


The question, from trude017mil was: "David, I'd be curious to know if you have gotten any takers and if new paying member numbers have been above, below or about what you expected? But more important than that, I hope you guys seriously consider the many points presented here, the likely death of comments, SEO impact from reduced comments & tons of content that will no longer be indexed, likely loss of users due to pissed off member base, PPC impact from all of the above... Like I said initially, I love SA and truly do wish you well and continued success!"


My reply:


trude017mil, thank you for your question, and particularly for the kindness and civility with which it was expressed. 


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, and limit myself to giving you the data you requested:


1. Signups for PRO have far exceeded our expectations, and there is no sign yet that the sign up rate is slowing. At the current sign up rate, we will be able to pay our contributors more, and increasingly reward them for value rather than pageviews. Paying our contributors more should enable us to increase the quality and quantity of articles for both paying subscribers and non-subscribers who read articles in the first 10 days after publication.


2. We're not seeing a concerning reduction in the number of comments. This is because the vast majority of comments are written within the first 10 days of an article's life. Of the relatively small percentage of comments left after 10 days, many of them are written by people who already commented in the first 10 days. Our analysis of the readership and comment data was the basis for fixing the paywall at 10 days, and ensuring that people who have already commented on an article are able to view the comments and add further comments even after the article is behind the paywall. While it's obviously not optimal to comment on an article when you can no longer see it, a significant percentage of new comments on older articles discuss the stock more than the article itself. We did a gradual rollout of the paywall to check that these comment patterns didn't change due to the paywall, and so far we're seeing no change at full rollout.


3. We took a number of steps to mitigate any impact to SEO, and so far we're not seeing any signs of damage to search traffic. Our search traffic just hit an all time high, and our contributors are reaching a larger readership than ever before and will receive larger payments.


4. We haven't seen a meaningful decline in article reads, nor a spike in account cancellations. That's probably due to the fact that the paywall only impacts "primary ticker articles" after 10 days, leaving the vast majority of Seeking Alpha usage intact. Canceling an account would mean that a user would lose real time news coverage, transcripts, analysis and email alerts on their stocks, when none of those have been affected by the paywall.

This doesn't necessarily mean we've got the product and pricing right. I'd like to continue to listen to your and others' feedback with an open mind, so at this stage I'll avoid drawing conclusions from this data. But I'd welcome your and others' reactions to it. 

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.

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-1
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.