In an increasingly Trustless world, one of our foundational goals at ETF.com is to be a trusted, central hub for investors, advisors and institutions. But that’s easier said than done. AI is everywhere now, creating a reality where the value of individual insight from actual experts is often overlooked. And if we’re being honest, even we’re not sure what’s human, what’s AI, and what’s bought-and-paid for when it comes to the media we consume.
So, here are a bunch of promises we're making about the content you’re going to find on our site going forward:
AI Policy
AI can be freakin’ awesome. It’s a “force multiplier” of the kind that only comes along every few decades. And like all disruptive innovations, it’s got plenty of caveats riding alongside, from energy use to hallucinations.
Here’s what you can expect from the content on our site:
- If an article has a human byline associated with it, like “Dave Nadig,” then the words in that article were typed or dictated by that human being. They (and we) take full responsibility for it. By no means does this mean we’ll be perfect and never get anything wrong, and certainly other folks may question our opinions. But those will be real opinions based on the facts we, as writers and researchers, can best determine them.
- While some of our best friends of all time have been copy editors, we’re a small, scrappy crew. Realistically, it means we will be using AI to check our work for typos, names, references and such. That said, we’ll be thoughtful about it, with human oversight and reviews of any corrections AI suggests.
- For video and audio content, we will use AI-based transcriptions as our baseline, which a human being will read through for common sense and obvious errors. We may use AI to generate headers or bullet points.
Sponsorship
We’re not running a charity, but we’re also not running a traditional media business model. Yes, we get paid primarily by asset managers, index providers, exchanges, brokers and other companies in the ETF ecosystem. That’s why you’ll see ads on the website, or a pre-roll video ahead of an interview, or a booth at an event.
But, all too often the line between what’s been paid for, and what’s been organically produced isn’t clear.
So here’s what you can expect:
- If an article has an ETF.com or human byline, that article was written because we, as an editorial team, decided it was interesting content for ETF investors, advisors or industry participants.
- Any content on the site that involves compensation – an issuer channel, a topic sponsorship page, an sponsored article – will be very clearly marked as such.
- We’re going to be doing a lot more video, podcasts and event coverage. And just like other content on the site, if there’s a commercial component to something, we’ll make it blindingly obvious..
We understand there is nuance here. If we take advertisements from “Sally’s ETFs,” and then we have “Sally” on for a chat, we get that this will look like “Sally paid for the interview.” All I can promise you is that we’re keeping those processes independent, while acknowledging that this is a very small industry. If we’re talking to Sally, it’s because we think they’ve got something interesting to say, regardless of whether they had the budget to buy airtime.
Trust First ≠ Free For All
There’s an inherent challenge to the above two policies. There are hundreds of issuers promoting thousands of products, each of whom likely genuinely believes they have THE thing investors need to hear about RIGHT NOW. And yet, there are only so many hours in the day, and only so much content we’re capable of producing. On top of it all, we want to make sure the content we create is helpful to investors.
We’ll do our best. That’s the promise. We’ll do our best to filter out the noise, highlight real, investor-focused innovations, and call it like we see it.
Cheers,
Dave Nadig, Prez&DoR, ETF.com