Google has just announced that Google Finance now provides free stock quotes in REAL-TIME. The “real-time” part is important, because all the major free stock quote providers (such as Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money) has always provided the quotes, but delayed. As a matter of fact, I had coincidentally recently blogged about why they delay the quotes on purpose, which to sum up quickly, is a pricing strategy to extract more money from those who are willing to pay more.
So with Google now providing the coveted real-time prices for rock-bottom prices (free!) you can’t beat, what else does this mean? I predict that MSN Money and Yahoo Finance will follow suit. That’s mostly my intuition since I have no hard facts, but I really do think they will.
If Yahoo and MSN’s finance visitors are not in the demographics where more value can be extracted from (i.e. people who actually buy and sell stocks), then MSN/Yahoo would have no incentive to drive down the price of real-time prices to $0.00 since it’s not a differentiator anyway–but on the flip side if real-time was a differentiator, then start the countdown before MSN/Yahoo tear down the silly self-induced delayed prices (uhh .. look out for your customers/visitors best interest and make them feel happy?)
In my opinion, the delay doesn’t really make people want to fork over even more loads of cash to MSN/Yahoo (so there’s little upside); it’s really more of an annoyance–”here’s your price, but ha-ha, it’s delayed”. From quick cost-benefit perspective, it appears to make sense to not delay the quotes.
For all the other folks like brokerages, if your marketing is around “sign up today and get free real-time quotes!”.. tough luck. Google just voided your campaign.
Kudos to Google for sticking to their corporate values: do not be evil (delaying information on purpose is evil), and to making useful information universally accessible to all!
This actually ties in really nicely to Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson‘s (author of The Long Tail) argument on why “free” business models make sense.