Benzinga: A new brand for financial news

Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab looks at financial news site Benzinga and its strategy.

Lichterman writes, “The content partnerships all link back to Benzinga’s site — Prieto said he expects Benzinga’s traffic to continue to grow as the company plans to ink more partnership deals.

“‘That gives us the ability to take that traffic, monetize it with advertising revenue or create free leads for Benzinga Pro or our Marketfy products,’ Prieto said, noting that they will use the products to promote one another. For instance, many of the Marketfy Mavens write columns on Benzinga.com that are available for free.

“The site was initially focused on covering only smaller companies with market caps of $300 million to $2 billion or so. But Benzinga has expanded its coverage to include investment tips and more as the sites it partnered with wanted additional content.

“‘We’re trying to bring that knowledge to the average investor,’ Raznick said. ‘It’s not easy because people only have so much time in the day. So are people going to go read the Wall Street Journal and then come read Benzinga? How do we impact the people on the first 20 seconds of reading our articles or reading our data? That’s what we have to think about.’

“The company also licenses use of its Benzinga Pro newswire, which it launched in 2011, to about 10 different brokerages including TD Ameritrade, Trade Station, and Lightspeed. Individuals can purchase a subscription to Benzinga Pro starting at $39 per month. That’s a fraction of the $2,000 monthly price for a Bloomberg Terminal. But the company says it’s not aiming to compete with financial data heavyweights like Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters. Raznick declined to offer concrete subscription data on Benzinga Pro, but said the number of subscriptions is ‘in the thousands.'”

Read more here.