I have been using seekingalpha on and off over the years and have witnessed its growth of data and news. I have to say I am very impressed on its simple website UI and solid backend, news offerings, and data lineups (from fundamentals to market data). I always wonder where does it source its primary news such as corporate news and economic news? Also, its analyst updates are also rather timely. Analyst research are publicly disseminated and only Cc'ed to well-known institutional data firms like Bloomberg and Reuters. How does seekingalpha get on the distribution lists? Also, if you have to make a guess, how much would you guess its monthly infrastructure costs are (servers, hosting, data, etc)? I would like to develop a much simpler and less-functioning one for say the Hong Kong market.
servers hosting is fairly cheap these days. Check out some of the cloud providers like AWS and digital ocean. Email them telling them your requirements and see what their sales offer
I obviously meant that analyst research notes aren't publicly available and wonder how they built their timely sourcing channels.