Seeking Alpha is one of the most popular stock market services on the internet. It reportedly has over 17 million users per month and a wide selection of services to follow.
Given its popularity and the reach of its membership, you might think it would be owned by one of the big brands or had been subject to a takeover. However, its ownership is still in the hands of its founder.
We take a look at Seeking Alpha below and how it is structured.
Seeking Alpha Membership Structure
Seeking Alpha is founded on the concept of crowdsourcing – it is open to anyone to contribute and believes that the best ideas and contributors will naturally find their way to the top.
It provides different options for members to choose from. There is the Premium membership option, which gives readers access to every article on the site as well as ratings from Seeking Alpha authors, Wall Street and Quant ratings which are based on over 100 metrics.
Then there is the Pro membership, which includes additional features such as top ideas, a short ideas portal, their VIP service and the advantage of having no ads.
There is also the option to subscribe to specific authors, who may be experts in a certain field – e.g. growth stocks, biotech stocks, and so on.
With these memberships costing from $19.99 per month for the Premium to $199.99 per month for the Pro, with millions of subscribers as you can imagine it generates very substantial revenues for the company.
They do of course have to compensate the authors, but as a business model it does appear to have worked very well.
Seeking Alpha Ownership
Seeking Alpha was founded by David Jackson, who started his career at HM Treasury in the UK before going on to work at the Bank of Israel. He then moved to New York and worked on Wall Street as an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Mr Jackson founded Seeking Alpha in 2004 and is still the CEO. He has grown it into one of the largest financial websites in the world.
Seeking Alpha is still a private company, with its office based in New York. It has received venture capital backing from firms such as Benchmark and Accel. According to data from Pitchbook it has had five financing rounds, so may be on a path to a public listing at some stage.
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