Market website pulls the live plug

By Phil Boeyen, ShareChat Business News Editor

Monday 25th February 2002

One of the most popular sharemarket websites in New Zealand and Australia, StockNessMonster.com, has canned its supply of live quotes and other instant market data citing increasing costs and a lack of advertising support.

The site, launched in October 2000 as a promotional vehicle for its owner Sydney-based Iguana2, has become a victim of its own success according to COO Adam Rands.

"This decision has come after much deliberation. Thousands of investors now use the site on a daily basis, and the royalties we must pay the ASX and NZSE have risen to unsustainable levels."

Mr Rands says despite a low-key launch the site quickly garnered a following among investors and day traders for its "many unique features not available on other sites and its speed and reliability."

The site made the decision at the end of last week to drop its live data feeds after its previous sponsor decided not to renew an advertising contract.

"We've always covered costs for the site but we couldn't afford this to become a cost centre," says Mr Rands.

According to online ratings company Hitwise the StockNess site continually rated as one of the top 20 financial sites in Australia. It also has thousands of New Zealand users.

Although the cost of infrequent users is relatively small for such a site, measuring in cents for a few stock quotes a month, heavy users can cost a company up to A$43 each per month.

Mr Rands says that the Australian and New Zealand exchanges would need to look at lowering flat fees for such services to be viable. Alternately, the online advertising market will need to pick up.

The change in tack by StockNess should come as little surprise to online investors who are increasingly finding that if they want premium information they may have to pay for it or at the very least be a client of a site in some shape or form.

The Australian Financial Review has run on a subscription model for some time now and Australia's most popular content portal, Ninemsn, announced last week that it would start charging for some services.

Adam Rands says he has received considerable positive feedback since deciding to drop the live data from the site, including a number of messages from people prepared to pay for the information.

"Most of the users I have spoken with are prepared to pay $20 or $30 per month for the service, but given that they are willing to pay for a subscription they are most likely to be heavy users of the site.

"A subscription of $20 per month goes no where near covering the exchange royalties alone. We feel there would be little uptake if the subscription were priced at a more sustainable level such as $80-100 so that is why we have not moved to a subscription based service at this time."

There's also been several negative comments from users and Mr Rands admits it's frustrating and demoralizing to get abusive emails after providing a free service for the past 18 months.

"Users have to realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch," he says.

While live data is no longer available the company says it continues to look at options which could see its return sometime in the future. In the meantime the site will offer 20-minute delayed quotes and company announcements as well as other services.

Comments from our readers

No comments yet