Some Seeking Alpha contributors making “serious money”

The Seeking Alpha premium program, in which the financial news site is sharing revenue with it contributors on exclusive articles, has been an unexpected success, writes CEO David Jackson in a e-mail to its contributors on Wednesday.

The site, according to Jackson’s e-mail, published 8,650 new premium articles in the third quarter. Its contributors earned $486,000 during the quarter, with new articles earning on average $55.49 each. The contributors are now on track to earn almost $2 million this year from Seeking Alpha.

“There’s a wide variance of earnings: for some contributors, the payments are just a ‘nice have,’ while others are making serious money,” wrote Jackson.

The site now has more than 850,000 registered users and reported nearly 60,000 reader comments in October.

Its other October stats were as follows: 61 million page views, 6.9 million people, and 8.8 page views per unique visitor.

“Seeking Alpha’s traffic spiked in August & September as macro upheavals drove interest in finance, and settled in October, but at a level higher than before the surge,” wrote Jackson. “We’ve seen this before: when traffic spikes, many people who discover Seeking Alpha for the first time return to us as loyal readers.”