The founder of financial news site Seeking Alpha says the company is not actively seeking to sell and is more focused on growing the company.
“We’ve had incoming interest from a number of companies,” said David Jackson in an email to Talking Biz News. “And since there’s always ‘some’ price a founder should be willing to sell at, I consider all incoming interest. But we’re not proactively trying to sell Seeking Alpha.”
Jackson said that there is no financial pressure to sell because the company is profitable and generating cash. He also said that subscription revenue is growing fast.
“We think that traction in subscriptions has multi-year momentum,” said Jackson. “And third, our investors are patient and excited about our growth and profitability.”
The company’s one page morning summary, called
Wall Street Breakfast, has 746,000 email subscribers and a growing podcast audience. Seeking Alpha has over 3 million investors subscribed to news alerts on specific stocks.
Jackson also said that the company, which started in 2004, is now paying contributors more due to their contributions to subscription revenue.
“And we’re investing more in our platform,” he said. “One example: we recently made the Trending News unit on our home page algorithmic. News editors can place a headline in the unit for a limited time. Otherwise, the headlines that appear in the unit are determined by what our readers find most interesting.
“This has some key benefits: the unit is updated every second, 24/7, giving our readers a fresher view of the news that matters, and we were able to reallocate news editors from supervising the Trending News unit to broadening and deepening our news coverage.”
Chris RoushChris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.