TalkMarkets Shareholders Update: An Impressive Quarter With Numerous Milestones

This past quarter has seen us reach numerous impressive milestones. These include:

• We’ve accumulated over 13 million pageviews since our May, 2014 launch. 
• We now publish over 550 contributors including many top names.
• Our user registration has been rapidly increasing as well and we have surpassed over 20,000 registered users.
• We now have a top-notch editorial team which operates 24/7 and publishes over 100 articles per day.
• We closed major partnership deals with Thomson Reuters, Nasdaq, Investing.com and others.
• We are also excited to say that we won an award – Business Economic's “Best Stock Site of 2015" and are a finalist for the 2016 Benzinga FinTech Award

Lastly, I'd like to share this actual photo of our logo featured on the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square, as part of our new partnership with them.

 

New Team Member

I'm happy to announce that Seeking Alpha's former Director of Business Development, David Datny, just joined TalkMarkets to lead our business development efforts.  David brings tremendous experience and his vast network of contacts in the FinTech industry, to TalkMarkets.

User Stats

Our metrics for user engagement has recently shown a marked improvement as well. Despite all our growth in 2015, throughout the year, we showed only modest improvement in quality of our traffic metrics.  We ended 2015 with:

• 2.3 pagesviews per user
• 2 minutes, 50 seconds average session duration
• 70% bounce rate

The above numbers are considered typical for our model and were not much different from where we started the year. However, over the last month we've seen a huge jump in the quality of the traffic:

• 4.5 pagesviews per user
• 7 minutes, 6 seconds average session duration
• 57% bounce rate
• 1 in every 3 users returns

Tech Achievements

This past quarter we've invested in polishing the site with numerous tweaks, bug fixes and enhancements.  We've also been laying the ground work, from a technical perspective, to implement our partnerships with Reuters, Nasdaq and Investing.com which are all expected to go live this coming quarter.  We've also begun to implement the larger "social" layer to the site.  Some changes worth noting:

• You will notice a new tab on our the header of our site - "My Network", though we plan to build this out further, we've begun to offer a way to manage those you follow, those you are connected to and those who follow you.
• On article pages, where we list users that follow the stocks mentioned, you can now differentiate between all users and only those in your network.  You can also now filter for who follows any of the specific stocks mentioned (before all were grouped together)
• When on another's profile page, you can see which stocks and followers you have in common with that person (interests will be added in the next release).
• Users can now invite friends to register on TalkMarkets (please consider using this tool yourselves - contributors earn more equity for every friend they refer).
• For those more interested in the social aspect of the site, you can now click to enlarge any user's photo.
• To increase registrations and site activity (commenting, uploading a user photo, etc), we now reward these activities with additional entries in our iPad contest, which can be tracked by the user in real time.
• The first stage of our Reuters partnership has gone live and our videos now appear on Reuter's site.  The first stage of the Nasdaq partnership is live as well, as they are now a contributor to our site as you can see here.
• We are continuing to enhance our spam protection. Last quarter I mentioned how our website could automatically scan for likely spammers and would automatically hide their activity from all users, except themselves until we had a chance to review their activity (their activity is still visible to themselves so they do not know they've been "caught" - in the past they would simply repost a deleted comment or create a new account to replace a cancelled one). However, if a spammer would only post one or two comments, it would still slip through our safeguards.  Now every time a new user posts his first comment, a copy of that comment is immediately emailed to our editorial team for review. If inappropriate, with a single click from the email, our editors can hide the comment from all users (excluding the spammer).
• Also currently in development, you'll soon see a social activity feed on the site.  We already give tremendous exposure to our authors. This activity feed will bring more attention to our users and show just how active our userbase is by highlighting how many users are joining the site, commenting, posting blog posts, etc.  It's a great way to get to know other users and for users to get their own following on TalkMarkets.

TalkMarkets is clearly getting noticed and just this week I've received two interview requests. One of our contributors was also featured on Bloomberg Radio this week and took the time to work us into the conversation (you can listen here). The TM team is looking forward to Q2 which is starting to look very bright indeed.

---

More By This Author:

TalkMarkets Shareholders Update: New Distribution Partners And Select Articles on Yahoo Finance!
TalkMarkets Shareholder Update: New Investment!
TalkMarkets Shareholders Update: A Light At The End Of The Tunnel