Wednesday, November 15, 2020

ONLINE STOCK CONTEST BEGINS WITH SEATTLE PAPER
EPredict.com Says Stock Picking Will Drive Traffic

from this week's Editor & Publisher magazine.

by Wayne Robins

Which league will provide this year's Super Bowl champion -- Dow Jones or Nasdaq? Will Microsoft, with a big-play offense but a suspect defense after being routed by the Washington Antitrusters, regain its dominance, or will Starbucks, whose consistent, caffeinated attack has given it field position in every desirable location in America, hold the ball long enough to win The Big Show?

You may think we're mixing our metaphors here. But ePredict.com, a financial Web site that uses polling techniques to anticipate stock performance, has started a stock-picking contest aimed at building traffic for newspaper business sections.

The site didn't have to go far to find its first client: Based in Redmond, Wash., ePredict.com used its home-field advantage to make a deal with The Seattle Times.

'Football contests drive readers to sports sections; stock-picking contests will drive readers to business sections,' John Kaminski of ePredict.com said in a phone interview. 'And contests build loyalty.'

Greg Heberlein, business columnist for The Seattle Times, has been running a popular contest in which readers pick 10 stocks from a list of about 200 regional companies. The best-performing portfolio wins.

EPredict.com is picking up the ball and will compile Heberlein's contest on the Web. Instead of one end-of-year column in print, readers of the newspaper and seattletimes.com can follow fluctuations of the stocks they've put in play on a daily or weekly basis.

'It sounded more efficient and will give the contest greater reach and many more entries,' Heberlein said. No longer will he spend December poring over more than 700 readers' stock-picking lists, some that are scrawled on cocktail napkins.

'We are always looking for ways to extend the paper online,' said Patricia Lee Smith, director of online products for The Seattle Times. And it doesn't hurt that the focus is on Pacific Northwest companies. 'This will make Greg's contest more useful and dynamic. And it's great fun.'

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Wayne Robins ([email protected]) is an associate editor covering new media for E&P.;