Investopedia editor Silver: My goal is to answer questions

Investopedia editor in chief Caleb Silver spoke with Farnoosh Torabi on her “So Money” podcast about the personal finance website’s strategy.

Here is an excerpt:

FT: Educate us on what Investopedia can help us with since some of us may be new to it.

CS: Sure. We are a 20-year-old – We’re almost 21 now. 21-year-old Internet publisher, and 21 years in the Internet is really like 250 years in real-time, just because we’ve been around so long and through so many cycles. I’m the editor-in-chief, so I’m responsible for all the content on the site at large, although I don’t write every article and I don’t edit every article. But my job is to make sure that our articles are of the highest quality they can be, and they help answer people’s questions. Because at the end of the day, people don’t come to Investopedia to come browse around the site.

We may have some super fans that do that. We are driven by search, and search is driven by intent, and by intent I mean you are a reader typing into a Google or a Bing or a Yahoo what is the difference between price-to-earnings ratio versus price-to-earnings growth ratio? Or what’s the best way to start investing $10,000? Or how do I short a stock, right? These are high-intent questions for investors and people in the finance and business world, and we cover everything from investing to high finance to corporate finance and small businesses in retirement. We have 32,000 articles on the site, answering people’s questions.

That’s how people come to us through search, so our job is to have the best possible answers for them to help them answer their question and then take the next step. What we don’t do, Farnoosh, is say – If people say, “Should I buy Amazon stock or Apple stock?” We’re not stock pickers. We’re educators, right? We do some news. My background is in news. So when I came here, the idea was we would start doing a lot of news. But once we started trying to get into that game, we realized that we were not well-suited for it. We don’t have bureaus all over the world with reporters chasing stories. PS, a lot of the news these days is a regurgitation of a press release or written by a robot, and we couldn’t compete there. What we wanted to do was provide the context around the news.

To listen, go here.