Asset Managers as Content Aggregators?
Many of our asset management clients face a common issue – they don’t generate as much high-quality content as they’d like. It’s a frustrating issue for marketing teams and most often chalked up to a lack of resources.
As I read about some recent developments at Seeking Alpha, a thought came to mind – should asset managers invest more effort in content aggregation and less in content creation?
Seeking Alpha is among the better known and regarded financial blogs out there. The site publishes 250+ articles daily, drawn from a pool of 3,000 (non-proprietary) contributors. Some of the authors, who include financial advisors, and individual articles get quite a bit of attention (upwards of 50k followers and 30k page views, respectively).
What’s interesting is that Seeking Alpha has accomplished this having paid exactly $0 for content. $0. For 250+ articles per day. My takeaway is that being a content aggregator has advantages over being a content creator. Three broad reasons why:
- Relevant third-party magazines, newspapers, and blogs produce much more content than individual organizations.
- All things being equal, more content should mean more traffic/attention for aggregators.
- There may be economic efficiencies in pooling strong external content versus creating proprietary material.
Given the challenges in producing proprietary content, should asset managers consider content aggregation as a strategy? I think yes. Would researching, licensing, and packaging 30 top-notch articles from external sources be more fiscally efficient and valuable to clients than producing 30 internal pieces? I think maybe.
That’s enough for asset managers to at least investigate aggregation as a part of their content strategies.