Let's hear it for the bashers
July 1, 1998
Upstart Web Site Wants a Piece
Of Net Message-Board Business
By JASON ANDERS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
A group of college students on a shoestring budget is hoping to use a few
new ideas to stake a place in the crowded world of on-line stock
discussions.
The group operates Raging Bull
(www.ragingbull.com), an on-line
investment site that has positioned itself to
compete with established message-board
giants such as Silicon Investor and Yahoo! Finance. In a direct attack on
those services, Raging Bull promises users, "No longer will you need to
spend $125 for a premium service or spend hours sifting through aimless
hype."
Raging Bull is operated by Atlas Internet Ventures, a company founded in
August 1997 by best friends William Martin, 20 years old, and Greg
Wright, 21. The company is run out of the basement of Mr. Martin's
family's house in Freehold, N.J. Messrs. Martin and Wright brought on
three friends from their schools -- University of Virginia and Rutgers
University, respectively -- to help run the site.
Raging Bull went on-line in September 1997,
but didn't get much attention until a major
redesign of its message boards a few weeks
ago. Its boards, powered by software Raging
Bull designed itself, include features to
differentiate the service from competitors. One of the most popular, Mr.
Martin says, is the ability to "ignore" selected message-board participants
and prevent their posts from displaying when reading a particular board. It
allows users to filter out participants that they find irrelevant or annoying.
Despite the fact that Raging Bull hasn't advertised, the company says
almost 5,000 users have registered since the beginning of June. "It has
been mostly word-of-mouth," Mr. Martin says. "We have people we refer
to as 'foot soldiers' on Silicon Investor and Yahoo who really like the site,
and promote it. We're really surprised how fast the word has spread."
Mr. Martin says there are plenty of message board users to go around,
and says Raging Bull isn't trying to siphon users away from Silicon Investor
-- where, he adds, he is a paying member. Still, he says, Raging Bull is
aggressively promoting its "ignore" feature and other tools to users who are
frustrated by the glut of rambling chatter that has swamped some on-line
discussion forums.
"I think the people who paid Silicon Investor have made an investment,
and are committed to staying there, at least for now," Mr. Martin says.
"But people who are using Yahoo ... they are tired of it. That's who we're
really targeting."
A spokeswoman for Yahoo declines to comment on the Raging Bull site.
For her part, Jill McKinney, Web master of Silicon Investor, says she is
aware of Raging Bull, but doesn't consider it a threat. "I think ultimately
they could be a competitor, but right now they have a lot of work to do."
As far as subscriptions go, she says: "We believe having a paying site gives
us a better group of users and more quality discussions."
Mr. Martin says Raging Bull's membership got
a boost from Yahoo's recent decision to
delete some message boards dedicated to
over-the-counter stocks, those that don't
trade on a regulated stock exchange or market, such as Nasdaq. Yahoo
deleted message boards it created, but allowed user-created boards to
remain. Still, Mr. Martin says, the action was enough to bring users to
Raging Bull.
One of Raging Bull's most active boards is dedicated to Mountain Energy,
the OTC stock of a small oil and gas company. Users of Silicon Investor
organized an exodus to Raging Bull after complaining that "bashers" --
people critical of the stock -- were taking over the Silicon Investor board.
The Mountain Energy discussion remains active on Silicon Investor, but a
lot of chatter now takes place on Raging Bull. More than 500 messages
have been posted on the Raging Bull board in the past two weeks.
Still, Raging Bull's traffic lags significantly behind that of others -- Silicon
Investor recently celebrated its five millionth post. Many of Raging Bull's
message boards, which can only be created by the staff, remain sparsely
populated. The Microsoft board has just 24 messages since being formed,
compared with more than 5,000 on Yahoo during the same period.
Mr. Martin, whose college major is finance, says he has been interested in
the stock market as long as he can remember, and made his first
investment -- in Hershey Foods -- at age six. He says he admires Brad
and Jeff Dryer, the brothers who started Silicon Investor in 1995 and
recently sold it to Go2net for $34 million in stock. But he quickly points
out that he thinks Raging Bull's content is better.
"Silicon Investor got very successful very fast.
They had so many people coming to the site,
but they never tried to sell them anything.
They didn't beef the site up with original
content. I think that's what Go2net will
probably do with them, and that's what we're
planning to do," he says.
For Raging Bull, that content includes a daily market analysis column --
temporarily on hold while the staff concentrates on the message boards --
a stock market simulation game and feature stories. Raging Bull also
maintains a model stock portfolio, but unlike the popular Motley Fool site,
Raging Bull's portfolio is not backed by "real money." The group owns the
securities listed, Mr. Martin says, but in significantly smaller quantities than
indicated in the site's model portfolio.
Still, the founders say they believe message boards are key to Raging
Bull's success, and are now concentrating their efforts on increasing server
capacity and attracting more users. "We know the message boards are
what draw people in," says Rusty Szurek, 20, Atlas's vice president. "For
now, everything else is taking a back seat to development of the boards."
Getting people to the message boards has been a bit of a chicken-and-egg
problem, Mr. Martin says. To attract new users, you need active message
boards full of the users you're trying to attract.
Mr. Martin says Raging Bull isn't turning a profit, and admits it isn't likely
to in the near term. "At this point we're not making money, but we're also
not losing anything except our time. We have a lot of sweat equity in this
project," he says. The site has attracted a few advertisers, but he says
Raging Bull needs more users to attract more investors. "Advertisers want
a large user base before they'll commit," Mr. Martin says.
As for the relatively young ages of Raging Bull's staff, Mr. Martin says it
shouldn't be an issue. "We're proud of what we have, and we have a lot to
offer," he says. "I think what we have is really different, and really better. I
don't think our ages should have anything to do with it."
Mr. Martin has two years of college left, and Mr. Wright, a civil
engineering major, has one. The pair say they plan to continue running
Raging Bull from school, and to stick with it after graduation.
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