Dateline: 03/16/98

Carlson Online is one of the busiest investment sites in Canada, receiving 40,000 distinct visitors and over a quarter of a million page views a week. Deceptively simple in its design, the site's popularity stems from its usefulness to investors. Fully 80% of visitors access the site during stock market trading hours, indicating it is used heavily for research by traders.

The man behind the site is David Carlson, a 38 year old engineer who works as an independent consultant on electric power projects, usually outside of Canada. David and wife Sarah live in West Vancouver with their three young children and two Siamese cats. We talked to him about his website at his home on Friday, March 6^th.

The Interview

Investing (Canada): Maybe you can give me a little background on yourself. Are you a stock broker or are you in the investment business in some way?

David Carlson: No. I got into this from a different angle. I do have my Canadian Securities Course but after getting an MBA at Western in 1990, we moved out west and I got a job with West Coast Energy doing financial analysis for some of their takeovers. That same group also did investor relations for West Coast Energy.

About two years ago some friends of ours announced they were starting up a website design company. In the course of that conversation I thought this is the perfect investors relations tool. You've got all these companies with information they want to provide and you've got investors looking for stuff. What's missing is the middle. You know, somebody saying, "Well, we've got all the information, so come look at our site, we'll tell you where to go."

That was just over two years ago, actually January of '96. And so the idea was that we would create a website that wouldn't have information on it per se, in other words we wouldn't be a data provider but what we would do is provide an easy way to find other sites that have the source data. So that relieved us of the responsibility of keeping everything up to date. All we'd have to do is keep our links up to date and that's a much easier task.

It's amazing that what has turned into one of the larger financial websites in Canada started as a little idea two years ago. It's basically something that I've done in my spare time.

Investing (Canada): Do you have any staff working on the website or is it just yourself?

David Carlson: It's myself. There are the other two guys, the friends of mine that actually did the site design. They run a company called Habañero Studios here in Vancouver. And I think to a large extent, one of the reasons the site has been so successful is they got the design right. They did it right the first time. They are involved in a very minor way just with updates, new features.

Investing (Canada): Do you have to go and search out information? Do you keep anything on your own database as well?

David Carlson: We have a fairly large database now. But literally, our database is a database of links, not a database of information and so our database refers to other databases.

Investing (Canada): Do you have something that automatically checks the links to make sure they all stay current?

David Carlson: Actually we don't check anything anymore. We have enough people responding to our stuff that they take great pleasure in telling me that my site screwed up. So we rely on our users entirely now, not only for site updates and telling us when we have a dead link but also for telling us when a new company has a website.

We don't rely on users for press releases. Those come directly from the wire services and those are updated automatically by the site. One of the reasons I've been able to run the site from home is that we've written it so that it basically runs itself. The two hours a day I spend on maintenance is answering email. I probably get 30-40 emails a day. And also if something goes wrong with the automatic processing of press releases, they'll get sent to me and I'll manually figure out where they should have gone and then put them in the right spot. So that takes about two hours a day and other than that, the site sits there and accepts press releases and posts them up automatically in real time.

Investing (Canada): I noticed that you have links to American stocks and American information as well.

David Carlson: We started an association with a group in the States called Wall Street Research Net where they cover all New York, NASDAQ, OTC and AMEX stocks which a lot of our users were looking for, and we cover all the Canadian stocks that some of their users were looking for. We said there's a natural fit here and what we should do is have a bunch of cross links. You've seen the search box that says "Enter U.S. Companies"; their site has a reciprocal search box. And in fact it works out about even. We send about 3000 people a week to them and they send about 3000 people to us. That's been ongoing for about a year now.

Investing (Canada): I think one of the attractions of Carlson Online is that it's basically a very simple functional site. You don't have to wade through a lot of stuff to get to where you're trying to get at.

David Carlson: It was designed with that in mind. We've set ourselves up as a hub. We don't want people to come onto our site and wade through pages and pages and pages. What's happening is that people are coming to our site from other centers. And they don't just come to the front page but they'll come to a specific company page on our site and then click on one of the links and go off to another site. So as a hub, we don't get a lot of people spending a lot of time on our site. What we get is people in transition. They're on a mission. They're looking for something.

Investing (Canada): And you're the clearing house.

David Carlson: That's right. So these are all the sites that we link to: Stockwatch we use for returns and quotes, Strategis is Industry Canada, Wall Street Research Net is US Information, Wright Investor Services is a US Company but they have research reports on about 500 Canadian companies, Canadian Corporate News covers about 40% of Canadian public companies, CNW is about the same or a bit bigger, ISDN Wire Services again is smaller, probably somewhere around 20%, Silicon Investor Discussion Groups and then the exchanges, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto and one more important one, SEDAR (Guide's note: SEDAR is the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval, the electronic filing system for the disclosure documents of public companies and mutual funds across Canada). Those are the sites we basically index. In other words we've been through and looked at every page of data on their sites and figured out what information is appropriate for which company and then input into our database where that link is for that Canadian company.

Investing (Canada): It must have taken a lot of work to develop all those links.

David Carlson: It's taken two years. (laughs) Some of the sites are very easy. An example is Stockwatch. Whenever we add a new company, we don't need to check and find out what the link is on Stockwatch because it's the stock symbol. Some of the sites are not that obvious. SEDAR is one because they use their own unique number. VSE is another. Silicon Investor as well.

Investing (Canada): You've got working arrangements with these other sites then?

David Carlson: Where our site has been very successful is in approaching all these guys, telling them about our concept and getting them to buy in. In fact, a lot of them actively support our site in that they make sure that we do have all the data that they've got. They all know that we link into them. They all approved that we link into them. Right now we've got about 6000 links back from all of these sites. So Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Silicon Investor, all link directly back to our site for information and the reason they did that is we're unbiased. We cover everybody. People don't pay us and we've got links to all of these other sites so they see the benefit because they're not just sending traffic our way, we're sending a pile of traffic right back to them.

One of the things that sets us apart from some of the other sites is that when we link off to another site we don't build it into a frame and make it appear as if it's our own site. We want to make it very specific: you've left us , you're now on someone else's site. So they're very pleased about that. In terms of active support, the wire services are very active in supporting us. Again it's in their clients best interests that their releases get onto our site. The same with the exchanges. They all send us daily updates of all of their listing changes. And Silicon Investor has been very helpful as well in getting our site up to date. And again its a very symbiotic relationship between us and all of these sites because of the traffic sharing which is beneficial for everybody.

Investing (Canada): Do you have any plans for expanding your scope? What you're doing?

David Carlson: We're starting to branch into private label sites where we package our information but in a site that has the same look as another site. In other words, to their users it looks like as if it's their own creation. So we've got a couple of those up and running right now.

(Guide's note: At this point, David showed me an example from Canadian Corporate News on his computer.) Right now, what I've done is gone into the Canadian Corporate News website and brought up a release just to give you an example of what a private link looks like. Down at the bottom of every press release there's a button called "Hot Company Links". Click on that and it brings up a private label site. (Guide's note: Here is an example using WIC.B, the company I work for.) This is essentially a different window into our database. It's the same database but what we've done is use their format to call up all the information. So it's got the home page, Silicon Investor and all the other links that we have. So that's an example of a private label site.

Now other plans. A lot of VSE companies decide not to use one of the three major wire services for their press releases , so we don't get anything. Starting next week, we will allow companies to submit their own press releases directly to us. So we're going to try and pick up a lot of these smaller VSE companies.

The other one that we're looking at is on the research report side We're dealing with a number of other suppliers now to have their research reports. Most of them will want to charge for it, so what we're trying to arrange is that when you click on this you'll go off to their site where you'll enter in your user ID, your password, billing information and then be able to get the report.

We're looking at starting to index the newspapers so that you'll be able to search the Globe and Mail database or the Financial Post database or Sun papers or whatever.

Investing (Canada): They don't currently archive their newspapers online.

David Carlson: They don't yet and whenever they do we're all set . If you look at the U.S. site, Wall Street Research Net, they right now have links into twenty newspapers across the States. So it's something that's very big in the States. Canadian papers are looking at it.

Investing (Canada): Well I know Southam has a big database but they charge you an arm and a leg for it.

David Carlson: Yeah, the same with Infoglobe and the Financial Post is looking at doing their stuff by payment as well. So they're looking at the Wall Street Interactive method. I don't know what's going to happen, but the beauty of our site is it doesn't matter. We'll provide the link. If someone wants to pay the others, they can pay the others. If they don't want it, then don't click on the link. We're going to make it very obvious from here which ones are free and which ones you pay for.

Investing (Canada): Tell me about your Today's Headlines feature.

David Carlson: What we do is we have the feeds from the different wire services and we blend them together on a single page. In French and in English …and post them up as we receive them. So you don't need to go to Canadian Corporate News, and then to Canada Newswire, and then to ISDN to find out all that's going on. We've got it all on a single page. So we get a lot of use on that page. For people who just want to hang out and see what's happening during the day that's a neat page to watch.

We've given the ability to search for headlines so if you just want to see headlines for TSE listed companies we can do that. We have the ability as well to search by industry group so if you just want to see gold companies, or if you're only interested in oil and gas, you can do that as well.

It's a service that just needed to be done by somebody.

Investing (Canada): Well it certainly fills a niche.

David Carlson: And it's now getting more and more recognized by, first of all, the major players, by the exchanges linking into us which was a real coup for us. You've seen the links from the exchange websites?

Investing (Canada): No I haven't

David Carlson: This is on the VSE. (Guide's note: At this point David showed me a page for a company on the VSE site. Here's an example to check out.) If you go down to the bottom of the page, there's a link that says "find home page, press releases, charts and delayed quotes on Carlson Online." Once people click on that they leave the VSE website and come directly to our page. We have the same thing from the Montreal Exchange (example) where the link is labelled "News Releases".

The Toronto Stock Exchange is a little bit different. They're looking at providing a link from each listed company page to our site but so far what they've done is just a single page called "TSE Just In" where they have all their press releases. They have a link back to our site. And again they use the search box much like you have at the Mining Company. It's really buried on the TSE site and is difficult to get to but we get about 5000 people a week just from that one page.

I can now watch our usage go up by about a thousand people a week, it's just unbelievable. We really have been on an exponential growth since we started two years ago. We've never advertised other than one ad that went out about three weeks ago.

Investing (Canada): That's incredible. I've certainly found it to be one of the most interesting resources on the Internet by far.

David Carlson: Again it goes right back to that very first idea that there's got to be a better way of finding stuff and this is very much like what the Mining Company, what you guys are doing . There's got to be a better way to look for stuff on the Internet. And that was the idea behind our site two years ago that there needs to be a central clearing agency that doesn't have the information, but will tell you where to go to find it.

The Carlson Online
Quick Tour

If you've never been to Carlson Online, take a visit there now. Here's what you'll find.

The Front Page: Here you'll find all their major search boxes as well as links to their headlines page. Most people who visit, though, don't come to the front page. They go directly to a company page, either from a listing on a stock exchange page or from a search box on another site's page. Investing (Canada) uses Carlson's complimentary search box on our Stock Quotes and Company Information page. Here's how their Search Boxes look:

These are functional boxes. Type in a stock symbol and click to retrieve the information. What you'll find on the company page the box takes you to are links to the company's home page, email address, recent press releases, Silicon Investor Discussion Group, SEDAR information and more. If you use the Company Name box, you need only enter a search string and you'll get a list of all the companies matching the string.

Today's Headlines: These are a blended collection of today's headlines from Canada Corporate news, Canada Newswire and ISDN News.

You'll also find a collection of Net Links, information on how to set up Search Boxes to Carlson Online on your own home page and information on how to use Carlson Online and other services to research a stock.

Investing (Canada) Notes: The category of Investment Clubs has been added to my Library of Net Links.

I've added a Search Box leading to Wall Street Research Net on my Stock Quotes and Company Information page.

Want a good laugh? I've added a few more links to my Eclectica collection including a daily Dilbert comic strip and a weekly stock market cartoon called Doubtful Accounts from Doug Pike.

Disclaimer: As with all my columns here, I should re-iterate a precaution. I am not a professional financial advisor. I am a financial journalist and editorialist. The views in these columns are my personal opinions.

American Readers: Looking for a broker who can sell you Canadian stocks? One of my brokers is licensed to sell securities to Americans in 26 states. She works for Canaccord Capital which is an excellent company with a superb research department. They are particularly knowledgeable on resource issues. Send me a note if you want to get in touch with her.

Newsletter: You're invited to get my weekly emailed Newsletter in which I let you know what the upcoming article will be and of any significant changes and additions to this site.

Copyright Notice: The Carlson Online graphic is copyrighted by Carlson Online Services Inc.

Previous Features