Interview: Boaz Berkowitz, Founder & CEO Of TalkMarkets

Can you tell me about TalkMarkets?

TalkMarkets is a new financial media site with content from leading experts. We’re a contributor model similar to Bleacher Report, which covers sports, or Huffington Post, which covers politics and entertainment, but of course our focus is the world of finance.However, there are significant points of differentiation which separate us from the countless other contributor websites out there.

First of all, we cover the entire breadth of the financial industry for the full spectrum of investors, from novice to sophisticate. But we customize what our individual users see based on their interests, preferences, and level of investment sophistication. This creates a unique browsing experience which is quick, easy and personally relevant for every user.Users love this since, unlike on other sites, there is no need to filter through all the noise to find what they're after; we give them exactly what they want to see.

Second, we put a much stronger emphasis on the social aspect of investing. We're integrating the best social tools of the web and building more of our own. This makes investing more interactive, informative and fun.

The third point of differentiation, which I think is the most interesting and profound, is that we’re fundamentally changing the contributor relationship dynamic.  Currently contributors only have two options for their content – to give it away to sites for free, or to give up the rights to their work by selling it to one site exclusively.Even then, they can’t have the article on their own site and generally only make a penny per pageview.In general authors don’t like this status quo and feel they are getting a raw deal. We've come up with an innovative way to completely flip that relationship on its head. We've created the first ever “contributor-owned” website where our authors actually get equity in the company, and they can earn more for helping us grow. This aligns our interests with those of our authors and makes sure that they personally benefit from our success. This program has proven to be incredibly popular.With no marketing budget and only a word of mouth effort, we now have over 750 authors and growing. And these are all quality authors with numerous publishing credits to their name include extremely well known individuals such as James Altucher, David Stockman, Mark Cuban, and more.

The reason we're able to get so many great authors and big names is that our management team has tremendous experience in this space. In its simplest form, we have taken a proven business model to the next level, with leadership that’s done it before.  Our team is from Bloomberg, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha, and more… we’re able to replicate our previous successes in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.  We have an existing relationship with thousands of authors whom we’ve worked with for many years at our previous companies.  They know us, trust us, and recognize how instrumental we've been in the success of our previous employers.

How can one start as a contributor on your platform?

Anyone can apply to be a contributor by submitting content to the site for our editors to review.But our authors are all established names in the industry – people we’ve worked with in the past or were referred to us by our existing authors. We’ve leveraged those relationships by inviting them to TalkMarkets at a very measured pace.I’ve never been worried about failure, but rather being overwhelmed by our rapid success; we don’t want to be stretched too thin with contributors flooding to the site faster than we can handle.Every contributor and every submission needs to be approved by our editorial team to ensure our standards are met.

When you think about it, there are hundreds of thousands of quality contributors in the world. If they're already doing the work of writing content, and are already allowing other websites to repost it - but not getting anything for it in return - here's an opportunity for them. To give it to a new site with an interesting business model to ensure that their content is seen by the people who most want to see it. And in exchange, they’ll earn equity in the company, which we know from other models, could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is all without them exerting any extra effort. We have established many ways for the authors that truly want to partner with us and help drive that success to earn additional equity.  For example, they can earn more equity for driving traffic to the site in general. We also have a referral program for our contributors where, for every new author they refer to us, they get 10% of any of the equity their referees earn going forward. That has made it viral, and how we've been able to grow to over 750 authors so quickly.

How do you generate income?

We of course generate revenue from advertising and we have a number of revenue streams planned for the near future.But we don’t want to discuss these just yet – many of our ideas haven’t been done before so we want to keep them close to the chest until we are ready to roll them out. TalkMarkets is a free website and generally, people who visit a site like ours are people who don't want to pay for content. A small percentage will always be willing to convert to being paying customers, but in order to be viable, a very large number of registered users are needed.So for now our focus is on growing our contributor base, growing our user base, and growing our pool of content. To date we’ve published over 70,000 posts and are publishing over 100 new articles per day (as well as videos and podcasts).

How do you decide which people to invite to the platform as contributors?

That’s actually quite easy for us; we've worked with thousands of authors in the past, so we already know who the quality authors are. And since we have an existing personal relationship, they're willing to take that leap with us and join, even though we’re new.

I've worked at a lot of startups in between Seeking Alpha and TalkMarkets, and what I came to realize is that in our space there's this “chicken or the egg” conundrum that website startups just can't get past. You can't have a lot of traffic without high quality content - you need the content to draw in readers, but you can't get that content unless you have traffic.Contributors don't want to give their content to any website; they want a trusted platform with a premium audience to hear what they have to say.

We were able to completely side-step that issue since the authors already knew us, trust us, and have worked with us before.  They’ve seen first-hand how instrumental we were at building successful platforms elsewhere and believe that we have the expertise to make TalkMarkets the next best thing.

Can you share any metrics with us? Can you tell us how many users you have besides the contributors or how many pageviews?

We accumulated over 15 million pageviews and have over 30,000 registered users. You don’t need to register to use the site but there are a numerous advantages to registering: being able to follow and connect with other users, social integration, getting instant stock alerts, etc.And most importantly, registering enables the site to customize itself every individual users.

We’ve hit 750 quality authors very rapidly and pick up more every day. That's a very important metric since content is king. Whoever gets the content is going to dominate the marketplace. Countless sites try to emulate the general contributor model, but they almost never get beyond the startup phase because of the chicken and egg dilemma that I mentioned. They may manage to get a few authors, but either they tend to be low-quality/questionable authors who haven’t been successful in getting published elsewhere, or the authors quickly lose interest when they see no traction and little-to-no pageviews.  We don’t have that problem and are growing so quickly that very soon we’ll be on par with the largest competitors.   

Who are your current competitors?

Any website that features financial news, opinion and/or analysis could be considered a competitor.  The Street, Seeking Alpha, Yahoo Finance, the list goes on and on. Seeking Alpha is often mentioned the most since much of the early brain power behind Seeking Alpha have come over to TalkMarkets and a lot of what we do is reminiscent of what we did there; we still have that basic contributor model, but there are a number of distinct differences, as we discussed.  But our coverage is far broader than Seeking Alpha so the amount of overlap is actually relatively small.  And I believe we’re headed in different directions.  In fact, we’re on good terms with Seeking Alpha and they are actually a partner of ours and host TalkMarkets headlines.  

Is Seeking Alpha the only partner that you have at the moment? How do these partners contribute to the growth of TalkMarkets?

No, we have numerous other partners and are adding more all the time.In addition to Seeking Alpha we work with Reuters, NASDAQ, Investopedia, Zacks and more.These sites host our headlines and in some cases are also contributors to TalkMarkets. We are also working on a co-branded product with Investing.com right now.

Can you share your plan for the next 6 to 12 months?

We’re about to seek another round of funding. We've grown so quickly that we really want to keep up the momentum, but obviously it will take more funding to fuel that growth. We have a lot of big ideas, but it takes infrastructure and resources to support those ideas, in terms of both capital and people. We're still very much a small team.

We're also looking to surpass 1,000 contributors, which I think we'll do in a matter of months. We're also looking to continue to grow our number of registered users, and if our growth continues at this pace, we’ll likely launch some of our revenue generating products which are going to be crucial to our long-term success.

Thank you for your time today.

My pleasure, we’re really excited about the unique platform we’re building at TalkMarkets, I could talk about it all day. Luckily our contributors and users seem to be just as enthusiastic as we are!