OT - "Silicon Investor Relegated to Message-Board Back Seat"
By Beth Kwon
Staff Reporter
2/17/00 12:19 PM ET
The rise of free Internet message boards hasn't been a boon to everyone --
and one of the victims seems to be Silicon Investor.
The subscription-based investor message board has long been considered a
sane destination in the arguably insane world of Internet stock message
boards. But as retail investing grows, and more individual investors head to
the Web for stock tips, it doesn't help all the players in associated industries.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Silicon Investor is losing traffic to free
discussion forums such as those on Raging Bull and Yahoo!
(YHOO:Nasdaq - news - boards) Finance.
When Silicon Investor was launched in August 1995
by Jeff and Brad Dryer, two brothers from Kansas
City, it quickly became a meeting ground for traders
who preferred SI's members-only atmosphere to the
anonymous, rough and tumble, spam-filled Raging Bull and Yahoo! sites. By
1997 it was at its peak, being the place to go to gain insight into the hottest
stocks of the day. In 1998 the three-person operation -- the Dryers plus a
"Webmistress" -- was snapped up by Go2Net (GNET:Nasdaq - news -
boards), a Seattle-based network.
But the shine seems to be off for Silicon Investor.
"All of a sudden there are fewer posts," says Mary Calhoun, president of the
Calhoun Consulting Group and a frequenter of the penny stock boards. "I
used to have sometimes 500 posts a day on my bookmarks, but now some
days I'll have 50."
Silicon Investor wouldn't release numbers. But TheStreet.com took a count of
messages logged for hot stocks, and compared them with those on Raging
Bull and Yahoo!. This rather unscientific survey suggests that the lion's share
of posts in hot stocks recently has been to Silicon Investor's free competitors.
CMGI (CMGI:Nasdaq - news - boards), for example, is always talked about,
regardless of news. Posters headed for Raging Bull on Feb. 1, where it got
641 posts. Yahoo! got 348 posts the same day and Silicon Investor's CMGI
board a measly 36.
Even when stock talk increases, it seems posters are steering away from
Silicon Investor. Last Thanksgiving, remote access card maker Ariel
(ADSP:Nasdaq - news - boards) saw a mind-boggling run-up. After closing at
10 3/4 on Wednesday and reaching an intraday high of 57 on Friday, the
stock spurred a flurry of activity on the message boards. Yahoo! received
5,581 posts on the Ariel forum between Nov. 24 and Nov. 26, Raging Bull had
1,132 posts during the same period, while Silicon Investor had a mere 404.
When eToys (ETYS:Nasdaq - news - boards) stock declined some 20% on
Jan. 27 on a weak earnings report, a negligible six messages were posted to
the Silicon Investor eToys thread, plus a sprinkling of another 10 on other
threads, totaling 16. Yahoo!, on the other hand, received 454 posts and
Raging Bull 198.
SI Webmistress Jill Munden concedes that growth isn't as strong as it once
was. "Posts haven't been growing exponentially like they used to be," she
says. Munden notes that the site has always had fewer, but more quality
posts, in part because of its "country club" atmosphere.
Bryan Burdick, managing director at SI, has a slightly different story. "On a
particular ticker maybe posts are dying down for a number of reasons, but on
an aggregate basis our growth is very strong," he says.
But if the numbers are so low for the most buzzed-about stocks, then the
question remains -- where are members "aggregating"? Not on Silicon
Investor.
Granted, Silicon Investor's discussion boards aren't as ticker-based as those
of Raging Bull and Yahoo!, and it has never enjoyed the volume that the two
free sites have. SI gets about 20,000 posts a day and has 200,000 members,
who pay $200 for a lifetime membership, or $60 for a six-month membership.
Raging Bull averages 55,000 posts a day, and has 440,000 registered
members. Yahoo! doesn't tally its message board figures. Even so, the
numbers for SI speak for themselves.
Some Silicon Investor members suspect that all of the boards are quieter
because of recent cases against message board posters who criticize
companies, such as that against Floyd Schneider, by Ziasun (ZSUN:OTC BB
- news - boards), a stock he'd been slamming on the message boards.
TheStreet.com covered the story. "I think people in general are reacting to all
the lawsuits," says Jeffrey Mitchell, a Silicon Investor member who was
involved in a suit filed by Business Wire after he and two other Silicon
Investor members set up a fake Web site as an April Fool's prank last year.
The case was settled out of court last December.
Silicon Investor, known for spawning celebrity stock pickers, may also be
losing traffic to sites set up by characters like Tokyo Joe, Anthony Elgindy
and Barbara J. Simon, who built up followings on Silicon Investor then started
private, paid sites.
Or it may just be a case of fading glory in the fickle world of Internet message
boards.
Free trial at : thestreet.com
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