Controlled Greed No Longer a Seeking Alpha Contributor

Recently, I told Seeking Alpha to take me off its list of contributors and to stop running content from Controlled Greed.

Why?

Because I get very little, if any, traffic to this site from my posts carried on Seeking Alpha. So there’s no benefit for me in remaining a Seeking Alpha contributor.

Controlled Greed is a “stand alone” blog. I’m not a money manager blogging as part of some marketing mix aimed at gaining additional investors. I don’t blog to promote a subscription newsletter or other paid service. And I don’t write in the hopes of getting my name out there as a journalist and land a paid writing gig.

Anyone fitting the description of that stuff may well find it advantageous to be a Seeking Alpha contributor.

From my vantage point, I could see remaining a contributor if Seeking Alpha ran partial posts and anyone wanting to continue reading the entire thing would be linked back to Controlled Greed. Or, if Seeking Alpha split ad revenue from pages carrying my content. I’m not campaigning for either of those. I’m simply saying I see no point in being a free content provider.

I wish the folks at Seeking Alpha all the best and maybe one day in the future we’ll hook up again.

Comments

[Bill aka NO DooDahs!]

Sounds vaguely ... familiar.

[DougM]

Did you have to pay a fee to put your articles there?

[George]

I too left Seeking Alpha as a regular contributor a few months ago. I quietly argued with them that there should be some form of revenue share. When it finally appeared that revenue share would never happen, I left.

Then I turned my attention to making ValueInvestingNews.com a revenue and traffic sharing site for investors. I allow bloggers to link to their articles along side mainstream financial news articles. Members then collaboratively filter those submissions by voting up or down and the best items then float to the front page. Members are rewarded each month with prizes from our sponsors for their activity on the site. We feel, like Warren Buffett, that appropriate incentives should be provided to achieve good outcomes.

Value Investing News also just launched an "Exclusive Features" section that allows selected financial writers and bloggers to post full length articles directly on Value Investing News. This gives investors that want to share their research a way of doing so without having to maintain their own website and all the administrative headaches associated with that.

If you are looking for an alternative platform to share your investment research and thoughts with like minded investors without feeling like you are being exploited, please consider joining Value Investing News.

[WorldBeta]

I had the same conversation with SA. . .

[John]

Bill: It should. You started me thinking about this a year ago, give or take. I would have stopped contributing to SA months ago, but, well, life got in the way.

DougM: No fee was paid to them.

George: Thanks for the info.

WorldBeta: Since posting this, I've heard from lots of folks who are having or had the same feelings about SA.

[David J Phillips]

The one advantage I saw to staying with SA was the link to Yahoo!Finance. Sadly, that advantage has disappeared, for Yahoo! now separates the SA news link from the primary news-wires to a separate section: financial blogs--which derives less traffic/eyeballs/click-thrus....

There had been a huge adv. to having your columns posted on the NEWS section of Yahoo!Finance. In addition to the aforementioned--Cost of posting on Yahoo!Finance: I know from my prior days in IR/PR work that Yahoo! used to split $500 fee/article with Businesswire & other wires to run news stories w. private bylines.

Still--My relationship w. David Jackson extends back two years and as I, too, am not a for-profit blog, I'll stay put for now. It's not like I'm getting rich w. Google's AdSense!

Best of Luck-

David J. Phillips, Publisher
www.10qdetective.blogspot.com

[David Merkel]

I've debated staying on seeking alpha, and a few other lesser known sites for the same reasons, though I do get some advantage from wider dispersal of my views. I'm staying with SA for now, but probably cutting off all other presently authorized non-paying external links.

[Olaf]

I thought that's the idea behind Web-2.0: transforming user generated content into user generated cash simply by providing a platform. ;-)

[John]

David Phillips: I simply think that if SA uses bloggers' posts in their deals with Yahoo!, etc. (not to mention their own site) to generate income, they should share a percentage with their content providers. If that model wouldn't work for them, then SA should post partial posts and drive readers to the appropriate blog to finish. But they don't want to do that, either.

David Merkel: Everyone has to make up their own mind. Just know that SA benefits to some extent from using your content, and the benefits aren't purely psychological ;-)

[Michelle Leder]

I also left SA nearly a year ago -- shortly after Barron's credited something that I broke on footnoted to SA, just because they picked it up.

Most of the big media outlets are offering rev share deals to bloggers: Reuters and Forbes are two that have been talked about pretty widely and there's more that are likely to sprout up. While the splits aren't all that advantageous, it's still better than what SA is offering.

[John]

Michelle: That's funny, Forbes contacted me about a year ago, give or take a few months as I recall, about running my content. But they specifically said they wouldn't share revenue, so I left it at that.

[Amit Chokshi]

This is one of the best blogs out there. I post on SA but yeah I'm one of those fund managers doing it for exposure. I don't get why the larger firms like a Forbes won't do revenue splits though, really makes no sense. If they think the content is worth talking to the author about but then won't figure out a way to comp the provider, it's idiotic.

Anyways, i always came to this site directly. I have noticed a variety of other posters that used to be there not posting anymore, i don't see Gannon's investing posts anymore for a while.

[John]

Amit: Because of your consistently great input with comments here, I greatly appreciate your praise of this blog. Thanks, as always.