TalkMarkets Shareholder Update

This quarter has proven rather exciting for us despite some very challenging times.  As many of you know, my mother unexpectedly passed away in November causing various emotional, logistical, and time consuming distractions. Additionally, we’ve certainly felt the financial strain as our site has grown so rapidly as have our expenses accordingly.  Yet these obstacles did not prevent us from reaching some major accomplishments while keeping our overall burn-rate minuscule compared to our competitors.

Our growth the past year has proved to be startling. 

• ·         We’ve accumulated over 12.5 million pageviews since our launch May, 2014.
• ·         Nearly 11 million of those views were generated in 2015 alone.
• ·         We’ve reached a major milestone of nearly 500 contributors (492 and counting) and expect to surpass that number this week.
• ·         Our user registration has been rapidly increasing as well and we ended 2015 with 15,509 registered users.
• ·         That rate only seems to be increasing as we now have over 17,000 users.

The most exciting news is that we closed a major partnership deal with Reuters.  Starting in February, Reuters will be hosting all of our headlines at no cost to us. Not only is this is a huge boost to our credibility, but we expect it to generate an increase in both traffic and quality registered users.  We’ll be sending out a press release as soon as the deal goes live but we have already begun to promote the partnership with a badge on our homepage.
 

We were also excited to see that we won our first award – “Best Stock Site of 2015."
 

Tech Achievements
Over the last several months we’ve also built several new features and site enhancements:

Innovative new spam safeguards: As our site has grown, we’ve increasingly become a target for spammers and internet trolls.  This is a constant battle for large websites as some individuals will continuously create new accounts and spam article comments and/or direct messages to other users.  When these users are identified and have their accounts deleted, they immediately create a new account and the battle starts anew.

We’ve built numerous new innovative safeguards of which we’re very proud. In brief, these safeguards will quickly identify likely spam accounts and automatically hide their activity from all viewers except themselves.  This way the spammer has no idea he/she has been caught and does not bother creating a new account.  When they find they have no impact (since no other user can even see their activity), they move on.  Every time an account is flagged as a potential spammer, our team is immediately notified to ensure that the user was correctly identified.

Social Tagging: as we continue to build out the social functionality of TalkMarkts, we’ve added social tagging, borrowing elements from popular sites like Twitter and Facebook.  Any user can now tag any other user in comments (e.g. @Boaz Berkowitz).  It’s a great way to bring friends’ attention to a particular post, and the tagged user gets a notification which brings them back to the site.  Users can now also tag stocks using a “cashtag” (e.g. $AAPL) and soon will be able to use hasghtags as well (e.g. #Apple).  These features will add new functionality to the site letting users search status updates and comments for these key words and will link them all together.
 

Connecting With Other Users:  We've also launched the ability to connect with other users. Most contributor-based sites offer only a one-way connection: the ability to be a fan or follow another user. Social sites prefer a mutual two-way connection (think Facebook or LinkedIn). But these are two very distinct relationships with their own unique set of related functionality and value. We've offered the ability to follow others since our inception. But now we offer the ability to connect to other users as well. 

These are independent features - users can follow any other user or contributor and be a fan - they will see the articles, tweets, comments and blog posts of those that they follow, but the followee would not see theirs unless he/she choose to follow them in return. Connection requests by contrast, have to be accepted by the other party and are a good way to connect with friends, colleagues and those you trust. You can connect with other contributors without having to incorporate their articles into your feeds if you don't want to. And of course, you can choose how much or how little of your site activity to share with others. For example, you can make your stock interests and contact info private, public, or visible only to your followers and/or contacts. We will be building out this functionality further in the coming months.

Other minor site fixes and improvements:  We’ve also pushed out many minor changes and improvements. Most notably, every time an author’s post is selected as a Homepage Highlight or Editor’s Choice, it will automatically generate a tweet announcing the honor and notify the author by tagging them.   We have found that authors appreciate the notification and it generates a retweet 50% of the time.  It will also automatically send an email to the author to let them know, and for their convenience includes the link with their unique author link extension. When they share this link, it brings in more traffic, while earning them additional equity in TM.

We used to show both the current stock price as well as the price at time of publication, for all stocks mentioned on an article page.  As our pageviews grew, the costs associated with procuring this data had become quite prohibitive, especially since the current stock price continuously fluctuates. While we still show the stock price at time of publication, we now only show the stock price to those who want it (a one-button click is required). This has resulted in a cost savings of 78.5%

As always, thank you for your continued support.