Seeking Alpha contributor hits $200,000 in annualized revenue

Eli Hoffmann, editor in chief of SeekingAlpha.com, posted the following on Tuesday:

It was with this in mind that we launched the contributor marketplace on April 2. We had an intuition that some contributors had much more to offer than was feasible to do on a free, ad-supported website. And that by opening up the opportunity for authors and users to transact around value-added services, new communities would form and new kinds of equity research services would evolve.

Internally, I set a milestone achievement target of having one “premium author” reach $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). It sounded like a nice big number. And it would provide proof-of-concept that we had carved out a meaningful opportunity for authors, and that some users were delighted with the opportunity to support their favorite authors’ research by paying for a value-added service.

We hit that number so quickly that I immediately reset the milestone to $200,000 in ARR. And yesterday, on day 19, our first premium author reached that milestone: Chris DeMuth Jr., creator of Sifting the World.

Chris’s forum has been wildly successful.

And we’re exceptionally pleased with the marketplace as a whole. So far, we have 16 premium authors (here’s a page that lists all authors’ premium services, with a brief description, and links to their profiles and publicly-available articles). Some authors joined on launch date, and some have joined subsequently. Every single one of them has subscribers (except one who joined last night). Also pleasing is the fact that in spite of our no-questions-asked guarantee, among 245 subscribers, only 4 have unsubscribed. (If you’re interested in becoming a premium author see here).

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