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Tip’d: Social Media for Money News
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Tip’d, “a community for financial news, ideas, and tips,” is a new socially driven money news site (think Digg or reddit, but strictly for topically focused news on money related subjects like investing or personal finance) that beta launched today. If you’re familiar with social media sites, then Tip’d is going to seem very familiar to you as it builds on the lessons learned from other social media sites. It was all the familiar usability elements you’ve come to expect from social media sites from the “Tip It” buttons below the current Tip count, to upcoming news, commenting, and even a Topple button (to bury a story).
Why use Tip’d and not larger sites like Digg or reddit? If you’ve spent any time on either of those two, or any number of generic social media sites, you’ll notice that the popular topics tend to skew towards stories that are funny, political, or technology related. Money topics don’t really find a home there unless it’s railing against a major corporation for a bonehead move they’ve made or it’s a “helpful tips” type of post that merely touches on money. If you wanted to find good investing or money related stories, you would have to wade through a lot of noise before you reached anything of value. If you wanted straight investment ideas, like FOREX or individual stocks, forget it (unless it was Apple and their product release schedules!). Tip’d steps in to fill that void.
Tip’d is focusing on the following ten broadly defined topics: commodities, economy, green, private equity and VC, stocks, currencies, funds and ETFs, personal finance, real estate, and tech. You’ll notice that it’s heavily skewed toward investment and money management topics and that’s clearly by design. As of this writing, many of the stories on the front page are about the economy and new financial news – you won’t find any of these on the front page of Digg.
Will this succeed? The key to social media sites is in growth. The more users, the more news and the more accurate the voting. It’s the network effect (think telephones – the more people use them, the more valuable they become). Will Tip’d succeed in taking over the financial news social media space? That’s hard to say but if you look crew behind Tip’d, it’s filled with internet veterans (SEOs, social media mavens, etc.) that have more than a few notches in their belt. (just one example is their community director Mu, who is none other than Muhammad Saleem, a Digg rockstar with a submitted story to front page ratio of 33%)
I have a sense that this site could become huge (it’s like betting on the front office of the New England Patriots or the New York Yankees) and it pays to be one of the first movers. (if nothing else, sign up so that if it does make it big, someone doesn’t steal your name!)
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there’s definitely a potential since they have veterans behind it.. but it definitely wont be easy to grab users that are truly interested in financial news from whatever source they’re already used to (whether its marketplace, wsj, yahoo finance, etc.).
being a social media type site, the community has to not suck too. heh.
although I’m not much of a social network/media person, I signed up at the very least to secure my username. muahaha.
look for me under blueprintforfinancialprosperity.
This is like the 4th or 5th attempt at producing a Digg-like site for financial news. I hope they have more success than those that have gone before them.
What value does this provide above and beyond digg, et.al.? Finance news stories in a “social media” setting is already covered by the big sites, and a niche focus has been attempted many times by smaller sites. Do they bring something new to the table, or is it just another clone?
Ok, ok, I took a look at the site and I can see how it offers something different, but its success will rely on the site growing a large contingent of contributors without being overrun by “make money now” articles and SEO “experts.” It will need wide acceptance to make any effort spent on participating worthwhile.
Good luck to them. Wonder if Bankaholic.com being sold for $15m had anything to do with setting up a financial news site.
I have to agree with Nickel on this one. We’ve seen it a few times before. It might not have the big names like other sites, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally different.
A friend of mine pointed out that the personal finance blog community really isn’t that large so he questioned the need for any sort of digg-like site.
I signed up for an account as mbhunter.
What will be key is how they combat blatant self-promotion, vote-up cartels, etc. Otherwise it will lose its value pretty quickly.