Stockopedia's discussion area has a long history. We initially set up a basic blog and forum back in the financial crisis as a space for more considered, and less noisy, stock market conversations. We immediately saw an influx of contributors and the membership grew. On the back of this, we started developing the range of data & analysis services that I'd always wanted to see on the web. In 2012 we launched these as our premium subscriber service - which has become so loved by many thousands of members.

Throughout this journey,  we've kept our editorial and content free to air - sometimes completely open to the web, and sometimes behind a login. Paul Scott's prolific writing of the Small Cap Value Report joined the site, and now with Graham Neary, their commentary has become a well loved fixture for so many UK private investors. But we also have weekly publishing from the rest of our editorial & analyst team - Ben Hobson, Roland Head and Jack Brumby especially.

Naturally, the news that we will be taking all our content subscriber-only from Saturday April 13th has disgruntled some of the loyal, free readership we have on the site. Disrupting the community is not something that I'm keen to do, so I thought I'd write a piece to provide some context.

So why are we taking all our content & community subscriber only?

Dispelling some myths...

Firstly, let me dispel a couple of myths that I've read in comments.

  • Myth Number 1: That the community is dominated by non-subscribers. This couldn't be further from the truth. Here's the proportion of readers and commenters split by subscriber/non-subscriber in the last month. As you can see - Stockopedia's discussion area is dominated by our paying subscriber community. What's more, this is a trend that is accelerating - non subscriber readership and contribution is perpetually declining as a percentage of the total.

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  • Myth Number 2: That the blogging content is vital to our marketing efforts. Of course the blogs are a key part of our value proposition - they are one of the reasons why many people end up subscribing after their trials. But we've found that people signing up specifically to read the blogs first, only convert to subscribers at a rate of less than 2%. There's…

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