Financial education website Investopedia has a new CEO — David Siegel, who was previously president at stock market news and opinion site Seeking Alpha.
Investopedia was founded back in 1999 and acquired by IAC as part of its purchase of ValueClick’s websites at the end of 2013. Now operated by IAC-owned Ask.com, Investopedia says it sees 15 million unique visitors and 45 million pageviews each month. (comScore pegs its US traffic as 7.8 million uniques in January, up 56 percent year-over-year.)
Siegel said he just started the job (following a hike to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is pretty impressive). Prior to his role at Seeking Alpha, he also worked at Everyday Health, 1-800-Flowers.com, and Duane Reade.
To folks who don’t spend their time following the ins and outs of the stock market, Siegel’s old and new gigs might sound pretty similar, but he contrasted Seeking Alpha’s approach of being “a great site very focused on very serious investors and professionals, kind of a small sliver of the total investing population” with Investopedia, which is more “applicable and leverage-able for everyday Americans.” (As I write this, the top story on the site is about 401k rollover rules, while many of the other headlines are about taxes.)
He described the Investopedia model as one that combines a network of “hundreds of contributors” with an editorial staff. Siegel wants to grow that contributor network, but he suggested that editorial curation and control is important too — just giving the keys over to a bunch of outside writers would be “too dangerous,” especially when writing about something like finance.
Apparently IAC has been waiting to find a CEO with the right vision before it begins spending money to grow Investopedia. Siegel said the site will “stay true to our roots” in investor education, “but we’ll do it in a 2015 way,” which means expanding the video side of the business, making it more social, and adding more gamelike elements.
“I’m extremely confident that IAC will be heavily investing behind Investopedia’s business as we build out a growth strategy — growth of the business, growth of the brand,” he said.