TalkMarkets Shareholder Update: Pandemic Struggles

We are still feeling the effects of the pandemic and it’s proven to be a real struggle for us. May of our employees are based in countries where they would not be eligible for any unemployment benefits, and so we made the difficult decision to not let anyone go.  They have always stuck by us when times were tough and it was important for us to do the same for them.  While I strongly believe that this was the right decision to make morally, it wasn’t purely for altruistic reasons – The pandemic will end eventually and it would have been very difficult and time consuming to rehire and train new staff. But as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc for over 8 months now, the financial strain of this commitment is nearing the breaking point.

The pandemic has also caused a dramatic decrease in our revenue as many of the companies we work with have cut back on spending, or have completely shut down. Our main partner, Ticker Tocker, which provided the bulk of our revenue, seems to have essentially gone out of business.  Though their website is still online, the entire staff was let go in a single day, and the authors we had sent to their platform said sales are no longer being processed.  Other revenue partners like Invisibly, Online Trading Academy and more have temporarily suspended all operations until further notice. Many of the companies that have continued to do business with us have started to experience cashflow issues of their own, and have not paid us in months.  On top of that, some of the vendors we work with increased the rates they charge, to help offset their own lost revenue.  This increase in our costs, paired with a significant decrease in revenue has begun to put us in a precarious situation as the pandemic drags on.  We are hoping to raise some additional funds to help us through the duration of the pandemic, so that we can return to being revenue positive.

Though we are facing a difficult time, the news isn’t all bad. We are currently negotiating to bring on three new advisors, all heavy hitters in our space. These individuals were all C-level executives from major companies (Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, and Seeking Alpha) and the three bring with them invaluable expertise and connections. We’ve already seen the first fruits from these new relationships, as we’ve recently closed a deal with a new revenue partner, Comtex. Comtex specializes in monetizing high quality content and helped Investing.com get a huge boost in both traffic and advertising revenue.  Our expectations are very high and if it does half as well as they say it will, we'll be in good shape as it can drive millions of pageviews per month.

In addition to Comtex, we've recently:

• Started to discuss a new potential bizdev partnership with FactSet.com, a large, well known company in the Financial Space.

• We've also started discussing a new partnership with FinancialJuice.com, another startup that's started making a good name for themselves in Finance.

• We signed a deal with WeBull to be an affiliate and earn commissions for any new customers we send their way

• We just completed a deal with StockNews.com with the rights to republish as much of their content to TalkMarkets as we’d like.  This gives us access to over 400 additional high quality articles every month.

I’ve also been asked to be a judge at the prestigious Benzinga FinTech Awards. It's a great opportunity to interact with the top financial companies, as well as the most promising new financial startups and will provide some quality exposure for TM among our core demographic. Unfortunately this year is going to be virtual due to Covid-19, which will limit the ability to network. On the plus side, at least it won't cost us a ticket to New York! The other judges include MarketWatch, Barron's, Fidelity, and several Venture Capitalists, so it’s extremely flattering that TalkMarkets was asked to be a judge as well and proves that we’ve established a name for ourselves in the industry.
 

In other news, we’re up to nearly 1,300 authors on the site, and have started a project to encourage our least active authors to become more active on the site. So far it's had about a 20% success rate which is far higher than we anticipated.

Our tech team has also completed an upgrade to our editorial system which will make our editors more efficient and will enable them to publish more articles per hour, with less work.

Stay safe during these difficult times, and with your continued support, we’re quite hopeful we’ll be able to navigate the duration of the pandemic towards continued success!