IQ News: Quote.com Will Syndicate Free, Ad-sponsored Charts

Quote.com, Mountain View, Calif., is planting an ad-sponsored version of its live stock quote charts on a variety of independent financial sites.
Quote.com, which derives about 50 percent of its revenue from the sale of financial tools and business information to other sites, plans to use such sponsorship deals to reduce or even eliminate the requisite subscription fees a client would otherwise incur.
As part of the deal, charter sponsors such as BarnesandNoble.com and Packard Bell will get a three-month run of banners affixed to live Java-enabled quote charts on the Individual Investor Online site (iionline.com), beginning today. More advertisers and third party sites are expected to sign up in the coming weeks, the company said.
The sponsorship fee–approximately $50,000–will serve as a subsidy to keep “Live Charts” free to the site’s visitors.
“What works best is finding a way for the user to get the information they need and getting somebody else to pay for that,” said Quote.com chief executive officer Chris Cooper.
For the syndication of ad-sponsored live charts on other financial sites, Quote.com needed to secure consumer advertisers because finance-related advertisers risked a conflict with the host site, Cooper added.
Quote.com’s ad sales team will place banner ads on the financial sites, with the sites getting a cut of the ad revenue.
A recently as a year ago, financial sites such as Quote.com and The Street.com subsisted primarily by selling ad space to financial institutions. But by the fall of 1997, Quote.com was seeing some success selling advertising space on its site to a broader variety of consumer advertisers including The Gap, Delta Air Lines and CDNow, all of which were interested in getting their brands in front of consumers with disposable income.