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Social Networking - Thursday, December 3, 2009

StockTwits Raised $3M For Premium Financial Tweets Service; SeekingAlpha Raises $7M For Stock Blogging

NYC-based StockTwits has raised $3M led by Foundry Group with existing investor True Ventures. The startup is led by Howard Lindzon of WallStrip fame. When he sold WallStrip to CBS, Lindzon was viewed as a shrewd quick flipper but given that that site has gone now-where we have to imagine that Stocktwits will be viewed with a bit more circumspection by potential acquirers.

Stocktwits has settled on a business model, which riffs on the financial newsletter model. They charge $500 per year for visitors to follow twits from stock analysts.

We have done a bit of day trading so we can understand how seeing real time twits on stock would attract a good number of members. What we like best is social aspect where traders puff out their chests. It would be nice to see it moderated a bit more. The premium membership concept seems like the way to go. Given value here and the model, we like Stocktwits much better than WallStrip.

In the same space on the same day, stock site Seeking Alpha, out of Israel, closed a $7M Series B round led by DAG Ventures with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. Interestingly, founders of both StockTwits and Seeking Alpha came out of finance, rather than media.

View - Stocktwitssite
View - SeekingAlpha site