TalkMarkets Shareholder Update: New Partnership And A New Milestone

Big news to share
We've signed the contract for the big revenue deal I mentioned in the last update and it went live. You can read the press release here

Ticker Tocker Announces New Partnership With TalkMarkets To Drive Major Players To Its Growing Leader Portal

We've long wanted to offer our contributors a way to monetize TalkMarkets and to sell their newsletter subscriptions, premium content, and other products and services directly to our readers.  Ticker Tocker has this infrastructure already in place, enabling us to provide our contributors with this ability now without haviing to wait for us to build a similar platform ourselves. This partnership benefits Ticker Tocker as well - they've done a great job building a feature rich marketplace,  but did not have access to a network of content producers to use the site, making this partnership equally beneficial to us both.

Not only will this be a 3-way revenue split for TalkMarkets, TalkMarkets Contributors, and Ticker Tocker, but Ticker Tocker will be advertising on TalkMarkets, generating additional revenue for us.  This has helped us to reach breakeven point, and even generate a modest profit, a truly important milestone for our startup.

Now for some bad news...
One of our authors submitted an article with an image that turned out to be copyrighted and we were threatened with a lawsuit. Obviously, companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook have millions, if not billions, of copyrighted images uploaded all the time. It truly is impossible for media websites such as ours to verify every image uploaded to our site which is why our terms of use specifically warn users about using such images.

In the end, after many hours of research and legal fees, we are likely going to have to settle.  While there's a good chance we would win a legal case, the legal fees would like be more than the amounts we are now discussing via a settlement. And if we lose, we could be liable for far more -  $150,000 plus the opposing side's attorney fees.

The only good thing is that from our research we have learned that there are many bad actors out there - people who deliberately flood the market with images in hopes people will use them, and then sue them (there are many free programs to search the web for sites that use your image). Individuals can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this (here's an example of one such story here).  This particular lawsuit is more reasonable and from someone who simply wants to protect his copyright. Now that we are aware of the problem, we have completed registration with the DMCA directory and have been more active in educating our authors about the risks of using such images.  So while this has been an expensive lesson for us, it could have been far, far worse.

I would like to take this opportunity to once again remind our authors how important it is to ensure the images you use are nor copyrighted. There are many websites that are 100% free and offer thousands of free-to-use, copyright-free images.  Some examples are Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.  If you can not find a free image to use, you may want to check out DepositPhotos as well.  This site is not free, but TalkMarkets has a premium account so we are able to use any of their images in TalkMarkets articles.  This site has a far more extensive database for images, including many that are specifically geared towards the financial industry.

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