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Pastimes : Charts on SI. Worth it? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (28)	10/16/2004 2:30:33 PM
From: SI Dave	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 40

Richard, I'm not sure where you drew the conclusion the anyone was arguing with users. If there has been any "arguing," it was with the demands and criticism of charts and portfolio users who were not subscribers and who did not contribute the to message boards. The overwhelming number of users of the portfolio feature were of that genre, but a whopping 5:1 ratio. >>Weird, very weird, that you'd prefer to trash our tools. This has been explained time and again. It wasn't a matter of choice; the portfolio and chart feeds belong to InfoSpace, and we were not entitled to them any longer. That's an immutable fact irrespective of what anyone's preferences may have been. Not taking anything away from the many successes of the Dryers, the dynamics of the marketplace today are quite a bit different from the conditions in the late nineties. In this environment, providing quotes, charts, news, and portfolios are hard-dollar cost items that need at least be offset by an income source, especially since they benefit only those users who actually use the features. The quote page carries an advertisement to help offset the cost of providing that package, but it doesn't even cover the third-party costs, much less the internal costs. Adding portfolios would cause quote usage to go up exponentially. If we are going to implement a portfolio tool, it's going to have to be tied to a revenue source generated by the people who use it. After all, we're not a non-profit organization... at least not on purpose! I'm confident that research into the prospect for providing a portfolio feature will get the attention and resources it deserves once more pressing issues are dealt with. I'm less confident that the users who claim to derive such great value from portfolios will be as willing to support the cost of providing them, but that remains to be seen.