Wallstrip Makes the NYT

Wallstrip is profiled in today’s NYT.

It’s ‘Squawk Box’ Meets ‘Saturday Night Live’
A few years ago, a video on the stock performance of Jack in the Box might have involved a sit-down interview with the fast-food restaurant’s chief executive, dryly discussing its fundamentals.
Today, it is just as likely to be a music video with a leggy brunette licking a French fry and a hedge fund manager wearing a massive gold chain necklace, both singing an homage to a recent “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
Welcome to Wallstrip, a three-month-old Web site that mixes stock news and pop culture. Featuring an actress, Lindsay Campbell, as a host, the site offers a short daily video featuring a stock at a 52-week high, as well as financial bloggers who discuss the companies at the heart of each episode.
“We saw a huge space between Jim Cramer and the bottom of the market,” said Howard Lindzon, the manager of a small hedge fund who helped create the show and is now its executive producer.
The popularity of Wallstrip — it claims to have an average of 10,000 views a day — is only the latest sign of the growing use of video on financial Web sites. Sites like CNBC.com and TheStreet.com have increased their video offerings, for example.

When the cable channel CNBC overhauled its Web site last December, an emphasis on video was only natural. Now CNBC.com has some 200 videos a day, drawing upon many of the same resources and staff as the cable channel. The offerings range from an original market update that runs every half hour to on-demand videos available through its subscriber service, CNBC Plus. It includes extended interviews, additional coverage and specials made for the Web, featuring the same anchors.
“This is part of a natural evolution of delivering news content,” said Meredith Stark, a CNBC.com vice president. “It’s a great thing because video is our expertise.”
TheStreet.com, which has also signed a content-sharing deal with Wallstrip, has taken a slightly different approach. Best known as the online home of James J. Cramer, the money manager turned television celebrity, the site began to refocus its video offerings a year ago, with the videos now available under TheStreet.com TV.
Besides featuring Mr. Cramer, the site has aimed for both the serious investor and the casual Web surfer, with features like “The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week.”
In its third quarter, videos at TheStreet.com attracted 4.5 million views, a 125 percent increase over the previous quarter, said Sandy Brown, an executive producer for the site.
Wallstrip is more like Rocketboom, the daily Web newscast with a similarly cheeky bent. Wallstrip’s producers, Adam Elend and Jeff Marks, however, say that they are carving out their own niche.
Wallstrip’s videos, ordinarily shot in an airy loft in downtown Manhattan or on location, have taken place outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and at a firing range in New Jersey.
They present an often sardonic view of why certain stocks have hit their 52-week highs. Ms. Campbell’s favorite episode, she said, featured her cavorting in the mud with live hogs on a farm in upstate New York while discussing Premium Standard Farms (whose ticker symbol is PORK).
Yet while the videos have shown Ms. Campbell climbing aboard a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and curling up in bed to discuss the Ambien sleep drug from Sanofi-Aventis, the site’s producers insist that Wallstrip also has a serious side.
Ms. Campbell regularly interviews investors and financial journalists. Bloggers engage in discussions about investing in particular stocks, as well as taking an active role in shaping the show. Mr. Lindzon credited three bloggers with the idea for the Jack in the Box episode, including writing and singing the featured song.
Wallstrip was born when Mr. Lindzon met Mr. Elend and Mr. Marks through a blog about nine months ago. The three discovered they had a common interest in creating a Web video brand, inspired by the frenzy surrounding sites like YouTube and MySpace. They provided nearly the first three months of financing for Wallstrip, then about $20,000 a month.
Mr. Lindzon contacted Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm that was a founding investor in TheStreet.com, for financing and advice. Beyond personally investing in Wallstrip, Mr. Wilson offered advice on expanding the site’s brand.
“It’s a fascinating new world, and I think what they’re doing, which is marrying a hip, short Web thing with a vertical, is a good model,” Mr. Wilson said. “Most people who watch this are people who work on Wall Street, who got an e-mail from a guy who works on a trading desk.”
Mr. Lindzon said that he sometimes invested in the stocks featured, but that such stakes were disclosed on the site.
Much like conventional television programming, the ultimate goal for profit seems to lie in syndication. Both CNBC.com and TheStreet.com say that they are evaluating various venues; TheStreet.com videos have already appeared on Yahoo Finance and Google.
But as with other Web sites the immediate trick is producing the content that will attract advertising. Mr. Elend said that Wallstrip would soon start lining up advertisers and sponsors, but has yet to generate self-sustaining ad revenue. He declined to provide figures.
Mr. Brown of TheStreet.com said: “The space we’re in is making demands that we be nimble and focused on what our audiences want while trying to attract more audience.”
For now the future for financial Web video seems bright. According to Mr. Brown, TheStreet.com is hiring still more video producers. And Wallstrip has completed a $500,000 round of angel investing that will provide, among other things, a year’s worth of support for the site, Mr. Lindzon said.
The host of Wallstrip, Ms. Campbell, has also benefited. Still a full-time actress, she will appear on two episodes of “The Sopranos” in April.

Posted by on February 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 am


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