Is or has anyone write articles for a living on Seeking Alpha? Now by living I mean just a modest one. Pay the rent, bills and have some left over for investing and leisure. I know what they pay per article ($35 per plus $10 per 1,000 views). I also know the amount you make depends on the quality and quantity of articles. But lets just assume competent person who can write reasonable insightful, provoking articles and can devote 5 full days a week towards it.
Any idea? Thank you!
I write occasionally for SA… I’d say not a chance unless you’re in the third world and have a low cost of living. Eventually you’ll run out of good ideas to publish, unless you want to publish just garbage, in which case you won’t have a long tenure there as people will call you out and you’ll have no credibility. I only write for their pro program so I’m getting $150-500 for an article, but these are high quality premium pieces and I simply don’t have that many premium ideas. I do it to keep my research skills sharp and to get feedback on some of my big ideas, rather than for the money (but an extra $1000 or two a month certainly is nice). Could I ever replace my income on that? No way. Not even close. If you’re writing mass market articles, expect $50-60 per article in revenue. There are ways to make real money doing this, I know a guy with a newsletter/portfolio service that makes six figures on the side from it. But that’s not through SA.
I’ve written a couple of articles and the earnings are really really poor for how much time it takes to a write a quality resource that offers a fresh analysis. I do it when i’m bored and want to re-analyze a handful of companies I follow (or like / hate) but it would be impossible to match my curent income from a normal job.
If you have access to a quality data provider (think capital IQ) it maybe decrease the amount of effort required but it still takes a good amount of time to produce something you would want to put your name next to.
i like seeking alpha. when you read them all and take a snippet of each article. it paints a really nice summary on whats been going on. in all honesty, i thought the place was crawling with ppl talking their book.
^ Yes it is. Need to be careful of that there. You get alot of bull cases that aren’t fully considered. I like to get some ideas from SA and then chase it down further. Anyone that would make an investment decision just based on one article is kind of deserving of failure anyway.
Have you done any work since their new payscale on quality small cap articles came out? I stopped writing for them for awhile for the same reason you indicated, but now I pull in some recent coin for the effort. My hourly earnings would be about $75-100, or in my funny money currency that works out to maybe $125/hr. It’s not bad for work I’d already be doing researching stocks for my own portfolio, the only extra effort is writing it up. But I’d never be able to expand that to $125 x 40 hours. I just don’t have enough actionable small cap ideas! To earn the decent payout levels, it needs to actually be quite high quality so its generally something within my professional expertise and something highly actionable.
That’s like 99% of Seeking Alpha, poorly thought thru garbage/opinions. Seems they are just churning it out to make dinner money (Burger King not steak house). I love ripping on that site! Never read the pro stuff of course, since I’d have to pay for that.
Thanks everyone, very insightful.
I see your point Geo that it times a lot of time to make the deep dive articles, but I’m wondering if it is possible to write 2-3 quick blurbs a day on say, “XYZ happened today and it effects ABC by yate yata” and basic valuation readings, “Typically ABC trades at 10% P/E premium to S&P but not 5% under, thus undervalued and yata yata”.
Do you see this as feasable?
^ I’d guess you might get away with 2-3 filler articles a day. That’s maybe $120/day. Not exactly a living. But consider that after a year that’s like 1,000 articles. You’ve got enough material to keep that up?
How are you going to do this while working in ER? Pretty sure this is not allowed.
^Well the reason I’m asking would be to do my own thing. I have other ideas to supplement.
omg u want to quit ER? whats wring with you
I’m not sure if you’re referring to me, but I’m not in ER.
Interesting… Do you have to tell them to select your article for “pro” or do they do it automatically?
You don’t quit ER. Ever. It’s a soul selling pact with the Satan fraternity for life only ended when the casket drops.
ER is thug life, man. You can’t escape. Real streets.
Automatically. It’s got to be high quality enough, for an under covered small cap and actionable. It’s at their discretion, but I’ve had good luck.
is there a way for me to tell that the article i am reading is from a pro? ty
yeah it says on top or you can’t access it.
what does the performance icon mean? any diea? when i click it, it takes me to a pro subscription.