TalkMarkets Shareholder Update: Awards, Accolades, And A New Partnership With Bloomberg

We have a number of exciting updates for you this quarter!

Metrics
We’ve seen a big jump in registrations this past quarter, with the average daily number up by about 50% over the previous quarter.  Our total registrations are now rapidly approaching 40,000 users.  Some days we see as many as 100 new registrations.

After several consecutive quarters of dramatic growth of our contributor base, we’ve intentionally and dramatically slowed our author acquisition rate.  We’re nearly at 1,000 authors, a tremendous feat.  But growing the number of contributors we work with also increases our costs, as it requires us to increase our editorial team as well.  Instead we’ve begun to focus our efforts on revenue generation (more on this below).  W0hile we do plan to bring on many more contributors in the future, we’ll keep growth at a minimum until our revenue increases and/or we attract additional significant investments. Last quarter I described how we had a sizeable potential investor who was very interested in us.  While the interest remains, he wants to first make sure we can generate revenue, which, in large part, is what’s driving this new effort. Generating revenue will not only help ensure the longevity of the company but will also put us in a much better negotiating position with significant investors such as this.  Meanwhile, last quarter did bring in two new investments which brings our total raised to date to $1,250,000.

New Developments
I have two notable achievements to share: Last quarter I mentioned how once again, we won the Best Stock site of Year from Business Economics. Well, I’m excited to share more good news in that we’ve been notified that we are a finalist for the prestigious Benzinga Fintech award.  Though we applied last year, we didn’t make it this far in the running. We are one step away from winning, and though we are competing against many excellent companies, there is a long history of finalists and winners attracting sizable investors, media attention, and more.   We are also a media sponsor for the event and will be attending the NYC event in person.  The winners will be announced on May 11th.

Also exciting is that Bloomberg has agreed to become a partner of TalkMarkets.  We don’t have an ETA yet on when the partnership will go live (the larger the company, the longer it takes), but adding Bloomberg to our rapidly growing roster of impressive partners is a major feather in our cap.  We’ve also agreed to bring on a new member to the team.  John Delauro.  John and I worked together at Bloomberg and he was most recently Seeking Alpha’s Director of Business Development.  He’ll be joining us in a part-time capacity on a trial basis to help broker additional biz dev partnerships and grow site traffic.  He also has some background in investor relations (IR) and will be helping in our IR efforts (more on this below).

Revenue
I described in my last update how we’ve been able to start attracting revenue by providing exposure and services to the Investor Relations community. We’re now gearing up for a full push on these efforts and have been hard at work laying the groundwork for a proper IR platform, identifying potential customers, and overall researching the IR industry.  This has involved numerous conversations with IR professionals and our creating and posting a job listing to recruit someone from within the IR industry to oversee these efforts.

We’re also the lead sponsor for the NIRI conference. This annual event in June is the largest gathering of IR professionals in the world.  Not only will information about our IR program be in included in the registration bag given to every single attendee, but our logo will be printed on the (high quality, reusable) bag itself.  Additionally, our logo will be on all marketing materials for the event and we will also have company representatives physically present to network, answer questions, and drum up business for us.  We believe these efforts will dramatically increase our revenue generation.

The timing is fortuitous.  The SEC has recently cracked down on one of the most commonly used methods for IR companies to generate exposure for their clients. So even those that don’t want to try something new, won’t have a choice.   The SEC also criticized many of our competitors including Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, Investing.com and others, for being complicit in this poor behavior.   They cited hundreds of articles published on these sites which were tantamount to being “fake news.”  You can read more about this here.  I’m proud to say that many of these articles were also submitted to our editorial team.  But they are top notch and rejected these articles as we suspected they were guilty of being “fake.”  Our competitors failed the same test.

Tech Achievements
In my last update I shared the troubling news that we had become a target for denial of service attacks and how these attacks frequently slowed our site down to a crawl. Occasionally, we were even knocked offline completely.  We had to delay our tech team’s planned schedule to deal with this pressing need.  I’m relieved to say that since completing these site enhancements, we have never once been forced offline, and you’ve likely noticed that our overall site speed has been dramatically improved.

With that completed, our tech team has turned their focus back to their original schedule.  First on that list is completing the upgrade to the contributor equity program equity calculations.  To refresh your memory, we’ve refined the program to place a much heavier weight on rewarding the contributors whose efforts actually help to grow the site, rather than simply providing us with content. Authors will still earn equity for the pageviews their content generates, but will now receive much more for actually helping to drive traffic to TM themselves, sending us new registrations/authors, and for providing exclusive content.  This is already live on our testing site, and once we are certain there are no bugs, it will be pushed out to the live site.  Possibly as early as next week.

Our next big tech project will be to build a process to help streamline and automate our current IR efforts as much as possible.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage the growing demand manually, but the busier we get, the more revenue were bringing in.  I’m sure that’s the kind of development we can all appreciate.

Looking forward to sharing more good news next quarter.