Old Media vs. New Media: What’s on the Horizon

This post is not intended to clear up the argument of whether Old Media vs. New Media is good or bad but to lay out the trend as I see it and to illustrate how Stocktwits is participating.

I live at the intersection of two worlds: the consumer internet and the financial world, in which I run a hedge fund and have done so for 12 years. I don’t read The Wall Street Journal, and  I don’t have a Bloomberg Terminal. My monthly subscriptions cost is ZERO because I rely on Yahoo Finance, Techmeme.com and Stocktwits.com to run my hedge fund and help me make angel investments. My rolodex and instincts take care of the rest. And thus far, this has worked for me.

The financial world, especially on the consumer side, was an early adapter to the web. In the early 1990’s, ‘The Motley Fool’ exploded into the media world with a raging online community and newsletter business. In 1998, TheStreet.com, led by Jim Cramer, gained mindshare and a near $1 billion market capitalization the day it came public in 1999. Today, The Street.com languishes as a $100 million company with an old and clunky website whose social buttons give it only an appearance of being social. Today, Yahoo Finance dominates the financial web consumer web space with something like 70 percent of the clicks, without being social but with massive potential. It is not social perhaps because finance as a category has never truly become social by web 2.0 standards. If you watch CNBC, for example, the same ‘experts’ from 1999 still trot out today: the makeup industry, horns, whistles, and fun graphics have covered up for the lack of advancement in television financial media.

In my opinion, social buttons do not mean you have a social and new media site. A New Media site has a different DNA, where social design and integration come first with content and UI built on top.

With the Huffington Post acquisition by AOL,  we see the benefits of managing a site with more social DNA.  The stories are picked, written, designed, and posted with the intention that they be shared within the greater social community. The acquisition price of The Huffington Post, and that of TechCrunch before it, are the new barometer for how the media will be conceived and constructed.

A media site’s activity stream, whether public or private, will have much more to do with how individuals will consume media. Today’s traffic measuring tools from Google Analytics to Chartbeat put tremendous power in the hands of editors and give them the ability to manage traffic, consumption, and perhaps also advertising revenue in real time.

At Stocktwits, we envision a slightly different model for New Media, especially as it relates to the financial world. We have built Stocktwits.com as a stream of ideas from traders and investors looking to share and collaborate. The activity stream is becoming more robust as people follow tickers, other traders, and investors, which will allow us share this information to help people connect. In addition, we are building a blog network that is 40 bloggers strong to date. We have created this on tools that we ourselves do not build, i.e. WordPress, as we believe each blogger should own his/her own domain and content. By doing this, we aim to share a common space on the network where we can promote Stocktwits and generate advertising deals that make sense to both parties as content scales. We believe the good writers and contributors will rise to the top and that overall sharing and our network effect will lead to more parties getting what they want out of their activities. As writers become successful and move on, new writers will be waiting in the wings for the opportunity to strut their stuff.

Eventually, old media will become new media as young people who grew up on the social web become the dominant demographic in the workforce. It is simply part of business evolution. If you want to speed up the natural process a little, don’t forget that content is still king and then think social first.