Yahoo! Finance/Seeking Alpha - Turn on the Bright Lights

Very, very interesting. At least to me. Whether or not this deal is truly "disruptive" (per Michael Eisenberg of Benchmark) or "noise" (per Howard Lindzon of financial blog fame) is not the point. I do think the deal is instructive because, at its core, it emphasizes the two key criterion for extracting value from internet content: understanding the relevance of the information being provided to the reader and the reputation of the provider of that content. Without these filters the signal/noise ratio is simply unbearable, and those in the investment business know that information overload is THE problem plaguing investors everywhere. These principles of relevance and reputation apply not only to financial content on the web but to the other verticals as well, but the Yahoo! Finance/Seeking Alpha alliance is a great example of taking highly relevant, highly reputable, specialized content and delivering it to a much broader (and interested) audience. Isn't this what the power of the internet is all about?

There were several other interesting points raised in the comments to the Seeking Alpha story, including that of David Jackson himself, CEO of Seeking Alpha (from the story in Venture Beat):

By putting the bloggers on a par with Dow Jones, Street.com and other mainstream sources, Jackson thinks Seeking Alpha will encourage even more bloggers to participate. Seeking Alpha’s aggregated content may soon dwarf the content produced by mainstream sites, the thinking goes.

So now you are getting the full image — the image of that revolutionary, proverbial long tail. “We’re tapping into the long tail,” Says Jackson referring, to the long line of contributors with a good opinion about stocks he thinks will transform analyst coverage of mid- and small-cap companies that newspapers and other sources don’t have the resources to cover.

I think David is onto something here. He's clearly right about the long tail. If you combine the long tail, and the ability to filter by relevance and reputation, you've really got something. Yahoo! Finance and Seeking Alpha have done this, on a small scale. What does Seeking Alpha have, 200 contributors? This a great start, but not what I would call disruptive. My guess is that there is a lot more relevant content out there from reputable content providers that is simply not being packaged in a way that fits the Seeking Alpha mold. What about the tens of millions of bloggers out there whose ranks are growing every day? Some of these people know stuff - good stuff. What about the tens of millions of great web pages from the government, regulatory agencies, unions, special-interest sites and the like? What about the tens of millions of interesting and relevant non-RSS enabled pages? I guarantee you that Seeking Alpha's contributors are not catching and analyzing all this information. Sorry, but the Yahoo! Finance/Seeking Alpha platform, while a vast improvement over MSM and clearly a wave of the future, barely represents the tip of the iceberg. Sorry.

The real juice comes in when you can combine the drivers we've touched on - the long tail (read: the ever increasing body of content across the wide, wide web), relevance and reputation - and combine that with technology that is intelligent (knows finance), scalable (can process millions of lines of text a day in real-time) and robust (Wall Street uptime, my friends). This, from my perspective, is the definition of disruption. The Yahoo! Finance/Seeking Alpha deal shined a bright light on the opportunity and value drivers for those within a focused domain. Relevance? Check. Reputation? Check. Breadth? Well... We are in maybe the second inning of a nine inning game. The question is: who will show up for the later innings?