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Hubdub founder says partnership with Reuters is 'first of many'

Posted: 22/09/08 By: Judith Townend

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Hubdub, the virtual prediction site, which launched in February 2008, has created a special section of the site, dedicated solely to Reuters.

Reuters will be able to question Hubdub's existing 150,000 users on what they think will be the outcome to current affairs questions.

The tools on the website will allow Reuters to build a community of Hubdub 'friends' and link to the agency's own market widgets and stories.

The site's new agreement with Reuters is the first of many such news partnerships, its founder Nigel Eccles, told Journalism.co.uk today.

"We will now open up the platform to other partners. There's no real limit to the number of partners who we could put on the site," he said.

According to Eccles, the arrangement will benefit both parties: "We want to build up our user base, and as that gets bigger they'll see Reuters' questions, which sends traffic back to those news sites.

"Reuters is a phenomenal agency. The technology we've got can make the experience for their readers really interesting. We're really excited about the editorial content that comes out of it."

The growth of the company has 'been very, very quick' and the relationship with Reuters took just two months to finalise after a 'chance encounter' with the organisation in the US, Eccles added.

The questions posed by Reuters have already proved popular on the site, which lends itself to financial news predictions: according to Eccles, Hubdub users were making predictions about the HBOS takeover a long time before mainstream news sites started reporting on what was happening.

But could Reuters' use of the site affect markets unfairly? Eccles thinks not: "Reuters are obviously very very aware of how their news affects the markets – we'd be pretty aware of not letting that become an issue."

When asked whether people could make predictions to better their own shares, for example, Eccles said: "We've been running the markets for about eight months now, and we've become pretty good at catching most of them. In general, we catch the vast majority of it."

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