Not long ago, I became a Contributor for Seeking Alpha. Seeking Alpha is an online investing community providing stock market news, analysis, investing ideas, charts and more.
What’s interesting about Seeking Alpha is that a lot of the content is crowdsourced. Meaning “Contributors” create content for Seeking Alpha to publish. It’s an interesting business model.
Anyone with an opinion on why a stock should be bought, sold or shorted, and who’s willing to put those opinions on paper, can write for Seeking Alpha. For Contributors, the barrier to entry is very low, which is great for prospective writers.
In this article, I’ll review my experience as a Contributor. And why Seeking Alpha is an excellent side hustle for passionate investors. Because if you’re already putting in the work to understand the stock, why not get paid to tell others about it?
Spoiler alert – you’ll earn more than you may think.
DISCLAIMER: This article contains affiliate links for which I earn a small commission if you purchase a product or service after clicking the link. Please know that I only promote products or services in which I have personal experience and/or believe could add value to others.
About Seeking Alpha
Seeking Alpha operates a tiered membership platform. Meaning part of the content and features are free to users up to a certain number of views. Subscribers to the Basic (free) membership are limited on the number of articles they’re able to view on a daily basis.
Seeking Alpha also offers Premium (my review here) and Pro plans which are paid subscriptions. The Premium plan costs $29 per month (or $239 per year) while the Pro plan costs $499 per year. Unless you’re a professional investor or money manager, the Premium platform is plenty.
After publishing an article, Contributors are gifted free Premium membership on Seeking Alpha. This includes unlimited access to content which is a nice perk.
Seeking Alpha provides data and information like that of a typical brokerage firm, such as Fidelity and TD Ameritrade. Except users can’t buy stocks through Seeking Alpha’s platform. Seeking Alpha also provides articles and analysis on individual stocks and ETFs. This is where Contributors come into play.
Becoming a Contributor
The barrier of entry to become a Seeking Alpha Contributor is very low. You can get started here. The application process is simple. And I don’t recall there being a waiting period for approval. I’m pretty sure you can start writing as soon as you complete these 5 steps:
- Provide your personal information such as name, age, address, etc…
- Upload a profile picture and describe your investing style, profession and areas of expertise
- Add an author bio and disclose whether you’re a professional
- Agree to Seeking Alpha’s terms & conditions
- Add your payment details
When it’s all said and done, your Author summary will look something like this:
Ease of entry is one of the things I like most about this side hustle. Seeking Alpha doesn’t require prospective Contributors to jump through a bunch of hoops for approval. Nearly anyone can get approved. Whether you get published is dependent on the quality of content you create.
Seeking Alpha Contributor Center
Once approved, your main landing page is called the Contributor Center. It’s here where you can view stats, earnings, page views, undercovered stocks and more.
Your Contributor Center will be sparse until you start publishing articles. But once you do, it provides valuable insights on how your content is performing in terms of page views and earnings.
Here’s an example of what the main page looks like. Mind you, I haven’t published an article since October 2022. I’ve been focused on creating content here, which is why you see page views trail off.
Also, I’m a new Contributor to Seeking Alpha, having published my first article in July 2022. These are my stats after starting from scratch, with zero followers and publishing around 1-2 articles per week for 20 articles total.
There are many Contributors with thousands of followers and hundreds of articles who post on an almost daily basis. I’d be very curious to see their Contributor Center.
Selecting What To Write About
How often you write and what you write about is up to you. You can write about Apple, Airbnb, Tesla, market conditions, interest rates or any number of topics. The key to getting published is providing value to the reader.
Seeking Alpha is not a platform to share your personal opinion on life. Or why you believe bioengineering to be unethical, for example. It’s a platform to share your opinion on why a particular stock is undervalued, overvalued, a buy or a sell.
Based on my experience, Seeking Alpha’s Editors are knowledgeable about investing. They’re not a bunch of English Lit majors scrutinizing grammar or run-on sentences. You’ll get more feedback on your content than your grammar. This is a benefit to subscribers.
There are 3 primary questions influencing which stocks I choose to cover:
- Do I understand the company behind the stock?
- Do I believe my perspective on the stock can provide value to readers?
- Is the the stock on the undercovered list? If not, is it a well known name that attracts a lot of viewership?
The first 2 on the list are self-explanatory, but the last one may have you puzzled. The third question relates to how much I can earn as a Contributor. After all, I don’t want to put 3 hours into writing a 1,000 word article to only make $6. Last I checked, $2 per hour is below minimum wage.
How Are Earnings Calculated?
Before we discuss how much Contributors earn, we need to discuss how earnings are calculated. Seeking Alpha rewards articles based on 2 payment types: fixed payments and variable payments.
Fixed Payments
Fixed payments are exactly as they sound. Contributors are paid a fixed fee for covering a stock which Seeking Alpha has determined to be undercovered. The fixed fee for undercovered stocks starts at $45 and goes up to $65.
The list of undercovered stocks can be found here.
If you cover a stock on the undercovered list, you’ll also receive variable payments. Though variable payments tend to be fairly scarce on undercovered stocks (around $10 to $15 per article). After all, undercovered stocks are undercovered for a reason.
Variable Payments
Variable payments are based on subscriber consumption. Specifically, Premium and Pro subscriber page views. The more page views your article garners, the more you’ll earn.
This is why it’s important to cover stocks with a lot of viewership. Especially if you’re covering a stock not on the undercovered list. Writing about a stock with little viewership is a great way to earn $1 in variable earnings.
Regardless of payment type, contributors are paid monthly. A minimum $100 in earnings is required to be eligible for payout. Payment is received near the end of the current month for the previous month’s earnings.
How Much Can Contributors Earn?
Even as a new Contributor, if you write one article per week (4-5 articles per month), you can make $250+ per month pretty easily. For 2022, I earned $85 per article for the 20 articles I published on Seeking Alpha. Obviously, the more you write the more you’ll earn.
You’ll also receive earnings on older articles as long as they’re being viewed. The more articles you write, the more you’ll benefit from this. Which is why I believe the “Year To Date” site average is $125 per article in the Contributor Center image above. Long-time Contributors are benefitting from aging articles.
How much you earn has a lot to do with, not only the stocks you cover, but also when you cover them. My most profitable article was on Apple which earned over $200. The article was published a couple hours before the company reported earnings, which drove a lot of subscribers to Apple’s stock page. My article benefitted as a result. It was blind luck for the most part.
But other times, I’ve collected the $40 fixed payment and no more than $5 in variable earnings for $45 total. Realistically, a new Contributor can reasonably expect to earn $60 per article. This doesn’t include any straggler earnings an article may earn in later months.
Your followers will grow in conjunction with the number of articles you publish. This too will help increase earnings per article because your followers will receive notifications each time you publish.
I can easily see scaling from around $60 per article in the beginning to over $100 per article within a year or so. It all depends on how much time and effort you’re willing to put in.
Article Competitions
Another cool thing Seeking Alpha does is sponsor Article Competitions on various topics. Competitions are held every couple months or so and cash prizes are awarded for first ($1,000), second ($750) and third ($500) place. These earnings are in addition to fixed and variable payments.
All Contributors are free to participate in competitions. All you need to do is write an article and specify in your submission notes that it’s for the competition. Contributors are typically allowed to submit 2 articles per competition.
Topics vary with each competition. Past topics have included “best pair trade ideas” and “stocks with a catalyst.” Competitions are a great way to incentivize Contributors to create content. And Seeking Alpha needs to maintain a steady stream of content for its paying subscribers.
What Are The Cons?
There aren’t many cons that come along with being a Seeking Alpha Contributor. You can write as much or as little as you want. And you select the stocks and topics you want to cover. If I had to complain about a few items, it would be these.
Lower fixed payment than expected
To be fair, this isn’t Seeking Alpha’s fault per se. It’s more an issue of first come, first served. For example, I may be covering a stock on the undercovered list in pursuit of a $40 fixed payment. But if another Contributor publishes an article on the stock before I do, I only receive 80% of the $40 payment. This happens when my article is published within 36 hours of the most recent article. I’ve been bitten by this a few times.
Unable to build backlinks to external sites
Seeking Alpha doesn’t allow Contributors to link to their own sites (such as this one) within content. Or to link to competing financial sites. If you’re thinking about becoming a Seeking Alpha Contributor to build backlinks, think again. Contributors are allowed to list their site within their Author profile, but inserting links elsewhere isn’t allowed.
Unable to connect with followers outside Seeking Alpha
I understand Seeking Alpha’s reasoning for not allowing external links. And for not allowing Contributors to connect with followers outside the site. But I do find it a bit frustrating. Any and all interactions between Contributors and followers takes place within Seeking Alpha. Sharing external emails and/or links is not allowed.
Commenters can be brutal
Contributing isn’t for the faint of heart sometimes. Especially when sharing an opinion that doesn’t align with that of the masses. Sharing your point of view, whether on Seeking Alpha or elsewhere, is likely to be met with opposition at some point. Don’t let the minority deter you from contributing and providing value to the majority.
Be sure to check out my review for Seeking Alpha Premium!
Summing It Up
If you’re looking to earn some extra cash, are passionate about investing and don’t mind writing, consider becoming a Contributor for Seeking Alpha. It’s one of the easiest side hustles to start earning hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month. Contributors can realistically earn $5,000 in their first year by publishing one article per week.
My only advice is to not become one of those Contributors who’s an article farm. Meaning don’t join with the sole purpose of spitting out as many articles as possible for greater earnings. Concentrate on creating value-added, thought-provoking content that resonates with subscribers.
It’s these types of Contributors who ultimately end up earning the most on Seeking Alpha, in both dollars and respect.
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