In short, I’m blown away. While most niche social news sites are facing their demise and losing their relevance even within their own arenas, Tip’d has done something that few have been able to accomplish in years.
Officially, Tip’d is now useful, and not just for finding financial news.
Today they released a barrage of improvements to the site that should make them a key resource for any Wallstreet-minded person with access to the Internet. The Social Tickers feature by itself is a tremendous tool that should be bookmarked by anyone who wants to track their stocks or target stocks with in-depth information and up-to-date buzz.
Just about every relevant piece of Web 2.0 information is a click away on these pages. The intuitive layout makes it simple to navigate to tweets, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, Tip’d stories, and important links associated with the stocks and their companies.
This feature by itself is worth exploring as it offers the ability for Web 2.0 and Wallstreet 1.0 to meet, but they have also added a nice video feature that allows users to stay on the site to view YouTube or Google videos.
Additional upgrades include:
- Top Domains – Websites that hit the front page the most often.
- Top Ambassadors – Those who promote Tip’d by encouraging signups get listed here.
- Facebook App - Lets users show their friends the latest stories from Tip’d.
- Inviter Tool – Getting the word out is the key to growth.
- Greatest Hits – The top vote getting stories – makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t do something like this.
While all of these are nice additions, the Social Ticker is by far the most newsworthy and offers the site an opportunity to make a splash in mainstream media. If it happens and Wallstreet takes notice, Tip’d may be able to take its nice growth over the past few months (200,000 monthly pageviews) and improve on it exponentially.
With the economic troubles of the world today, couldn’t we all use a tip or two?
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Read more about niche social media sites on this Social Media Blog.
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just checked this out… it’s interesting, personally, for the ability to track all those items on my (limited) portfolio. nice work tip’d
While I applaud their willingness to grow and improve, isn’t Tip’d taking a chance by continuing to stay within such a niche market?
Yes, people will always be interested in stocks and shares and financial news, but if it’s always bad, that could keep people away.
And from a social network point of view, that’s the most important factor.
@Mike – at least you have a portfolio.
@Danny – that was my first thoughts, but now I’m more hopeful. Niche social media isn’t that much different from broad social media in that if all you are attracting are social media users, you won’t make money as a site (regardless of whether you’re niche like tip’d or broad like digg).
The part that is encouraging is that they may be able to bridge the gap into the other 98% of the active Internet users who do not use social media normally. Attracting the small but potent financial segment of the world can definitely help them turn a profit where other social media sites have failed.
Good point JD – here’s hoping they pull it off, it would be good to start seeing more uses of social media in ways that attract the “normal” users.