How Republishing and Content Syndication Create Value for a Financial Online Publisher

Financial journalist and former equity analyst Jacob Wolinsky became an online publisher, editor and entrepreneur in Januar when he launched ValueWalk.com, a news website for value investors. When he began, it was just him.

Today, the site is considered one of the top 50 investing blogs by The Daily Reckoning. It attracts 4 million visits per month – 2 million unique visitors. ValueWalk has been included in Bloomberg’s Terminal VIP Twitter list, has been named a must-follow for fundamental investors by Stocktwits, and a must-follow by Business Insider in 2012 and in 2013.

Its focus has expanded. While the site is a go-to resource for value investors, it now also covers Wall Street news especially hedge funds. Now Wolinsky, who serves as editor-in-chief — as well as chief dish and bottle washer — is joined by a chief technolo­­gy officer, several full time writers, and a cadre of expert content contributors. He is in the process of building a small staff in the company’s New Jersey based office.

 Audience Engagement is Job One

They post about 50 new articles per day. So how does this small organization meet the daily information needs of its savvy and upscale audience? How does it keep them engaged?

“We break news and move markets,” said Wolinsky. “If a hedge fund takes a large position, many times we are the first to report that, and it could and many times does move the stock up or down.” “We’ve become famous in the value investing community for providing both fresh content and evergreen information. We have research and resources on the site, as well as our own investigative reports. But it’s certainly a challenge coming up with the credible and actionable information which many readers like to read.”

The Benefits of Third-Party Content

In addition to producing its own content, both in-house and via regular contributors, ValueWalk offers third-party content through various content partnerships established over time. Wolinsky has obtained individual permissions from other sites, but that is time consuming when every day is a deadline.

In late, he discovered the repubHub content republishing portal, while it was still in beta.

“It’s amazing to have new content daily from top publishers like Investor’s Business Daily, Financial Post, Source Media, International Business Times, UPI.com, Newsweek and others – all fully pre-licensed. I can embed the content like I would a YouTube video, which keeps readers on my site rather than having them link out to read content on someone else’s turf.”

A Smart Revenue Strategy

Most of the articles Wolinsky licenses on repubHub are free, ad-supported. Others are available ad-free at a very modest cost – just a few dollars. This fits perfectly with his business model.

“My site and the business are largely ad-supported,” said Wolinsky. “I rejected the paid subscription model. I wanted the content to be free to my readers. The only subscription we offer is a free one to our daily newsletter, which has tens of thousands of subscribers. We have added other revenue streams so that we can cut down on the number of ads on the site and still keep it free. Ironically, repubHub offered a solution to that as well!”

While Wolinsky started his relationship with repubHub as a user of content, he has recently begun syndicating select, original ValueWalk content through repubHub. Now his own ad-supported content can travel to new readers far beyond the ValueWalk site, generating revenues.

We are pleased to feature ValueWalk  in our Publisher Spotlight series.  They are a great example of why we created repubHub: to make it easy for high-quality sites to share great content as both publisher and republisher. It’s only fitting to share with you some recent content from ValueWalk via repubHub.  Here’s  an example of their breaking news coverage.

Why not to meet your own content needs?

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