TheStreet seeks acquisitions, contributing writers

The following comments were made by TheStreet.com chief executive officer Elisabeth DeMarse during the company’s fourth-quarter conference call on Thursday:

We continue to aggressively search for attractive targets. A recent study by BDO reported that pricing and availability of quality targets are top challenges for private equity funds in 2014. We too are finding that pricing is also affecting us and our search for targets. So the pace of completed acquisitions may not be as rapid as we would like. Having said that, we hope to complete at least one significant acquisition in 2014.

In closing, I would like to announce an important initiative for 2014, which is our contributor program, also known as Indefatigable. Our goal is to attract smart influential writers, analysts and money managers to augment the work of our newsrooms, and who want to be part of our mission. This is an important initiative lead personally by Jim Cramer to attract the best and brightest stock minds to join our publisher platform. By publishing on our platform, smart research can be amplified to TheStreet’s 95,000 Twitter followers, Jim Cramer’s 730,000 Twitter followers and our 122,000 Facebook fans. The Indefatigable contributor platform returns us to our roots and original vision where TheStreet served — stood for bringing smart, independent Wall-Street-quality equity analysis to main street.

In addition to attracting new contributors, we’ve launched blogs for our writers, providing us with another avenue for reaching our audience. We’ve launched blogs for Stephanie Link; for Herb Greenberg, as a complement and lead generator for Reality Check; and for Adam Feuerstein, who is our award winning biotech reporter. Beyond the launch of our Indefatigable CMS, we don’t expect any big strategic changes, but expect to see an accelerated pace or improvement internally that will ultimately be reflected in the performance of the company.

Read the entire transcript here.