How does QuotedData make money if its free for investors to access the service?
We have tried to make QuotedData free for all investors. To deliver on this mission we thought long and hard about the best ways to fund things, which don’t impact our independence. After looking at various business models, from multiple industries, we concluded that we should follow the publishing route. Payment received by advertising, sponsorship and event sales from companies, and in our case, investment trusts, REITs and asset managers. This is very similar to most publishers, however as analysts (which sometimes results on writing on the companies that pay us) we felt we had to take things a step further in these cases. See below.
How to you choose what to write on?
If it’s interesting or news worthy, we’ll write on it. We cover the whole market, with research, news and data coverage, not just a select few.
Why don’t you just write nice things about your clients?
We would lose readership, the investor following is the key to our growth. If we jeopardise this, it wouldn’t work.
How do you manage any conflicts when you writing on a paying client?
Some funds and asset managers do ask us to do more in depth work, for those we take on, we always ensure the money is taken up front before we start work, ensure the fund (and its asset manager) understands the need for independence, and in every case we have full editing control, with external editors to ensure we write with a balanced view, which work with our strict guidelines.
Would you write on anything that pays you?
We don’t take up all opportunities that come our way, our investment committee turns down funds we don’t like.
The right approach?
We feel this multifaceted approach works best to achieve our goal of growing our coverage, business and quality of staff, alongside the free service to all investors. The funding also allows us to dig deeper, allowing us to offer a higher level commentary that you can’t access anywhere else. We hope you enjoy the service and can share our excitement in what we write about.
Data is the new fee, are contact details given to third parties?
Your contact details are not given to third parties unless you explicitly express you wish for that to happen. We hate it when this happens with us, without our expressed permission given. We also hate solus emails, so we don’t offer advertisers these. Solus emails are emails publishers typically sell, to allow advertising partners to email you directly. The only way they can expose you their content is via our publications, with our input, combined with our content, to increase the value add experience with every email.
Other data given away?
We do provide clients and potential clients general data on readership which helps us generate advertising and sponsorship revenues from clients, but this will never on individual readers unless it was every explicitly opted in. Such as “x’000 readers read this article…”
Write comments!
Without our investor base readership we would struggle to survive, so please keep us on our laurels by engaging with our content. If you feel anything is off, or you feel we have missed a story or angle, or you would simply like to learn a topic we haven’t covered, please do alert our team by writing comments on a our news posts. Thank you and hope you enjoy our work.