Tip'd targets vanishingly small audience of finance junkies
Yet another Digg clone, targeted at a small slice of the news market. Isn't Tip'd exactly the kind of me-too company the bursting of the bubble is supposed to crowd out? VentureBeat, strangely, calls the site's launch "timely." And yet the best times for financial-information sites, in terms of having matter to cover, are the worst times for their endemic advertisers. Wall Street mayhem makes for lots of pageviews at the same time it makes those pages harder to fill with ads. Tip'd may well find a niche audience for market obsessives. But a niche audience is not a big business.Why, then, are so many publications writing about Tip'd? Let me spell it out for you: The community director of Tip'd, Muhammad Saleem, is a top user on Digg. His heavy usage means that his votes tend to carry more weight on the site. Would some Web writers cover new venture in the hopes that he might feel inclined to Digg their stories down the road? Stranger things have happened.