Benzinga.com is a financial news website in Detroit, Mich., which sells promotional "news" packages for $5,750, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. Benzinga's editorial staff of about 30 people published hundreds of stories each day, including the paid packages it said were produced by a "dedicated team," according to the CJR report in 2021.
With its claim of 25 million monthly visitors and checkered history, Benzinga sought additional revenue by sponsoring conferences on crypto-currency and marijuana for small investors, as well as from premium subscriptions and its catalog of Benzinga stock-trading courses that promise to "aim for" six-month returns of up to 500%. It also provided unspecified services to the brokerage companies Robinhood, TD Ameritrade and Fidelity Investments.
Beringer Capital of Toronto acquired Benzinga in 2021 in a private transaction that "valued Benzinga at more than $300 million," according to Benzinga, although this assertion was never independently verified.
Awards and Highlights
Benzinga founder and chief executive Jason Raznick, who has said he favors "rule breakers, dreamers and doers," received a 2022 award for "disrupting financial media" from the Michigan Venture Capital Association, which described itself as "the voice of Michigan's investment community."
Crypto-Currency Investor
Also in 2022, Benzinga's Raznick was among the seven largest unsecured creditors of crypto-currency broker Voyager Digital. This relationship was undisclosed in Benzinga's Voyager news coverage, including its June 13 "Exclusive" in which Voyager's CEO claimed that its customers' assets "are safe." Within weeks of this, two federal agencies jointly ordered Voyager to "cease and desist" from false statements about its deposit insurance status "directly or by implication." Voyager had suspended operations July 1.
'Pump and Dump'
Although not a defendant, in 2017 Benzinga was implicated in two separate civil lawsuits filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning fraudulent stock promotion. The SEC charged 27 firms and individuals in the two suits, in which defendants ultimately paid individual fines ranging up to about $61,000.
Related to this action, the SEC issued an "investor warning" noting that: "Articles on an investment research website that appear to be an unbiased source of information or provide commentary on multiple stocks may be part of an undisclosed paid stock promotion.".
Benzinga said it was "a victim, not a culprit" in the fraudulent stock promotions, and unaware of problems with articles at issue with the SEC that Benzinga published during a nearly four-year period. The purported news items, numbering in the "hundreds," were also published by SmallCapNetwork.com, InvestorVillage.com, Fool.com, and several other comparable websites, according the SEC, which didn't charge any of the sites with wrongdoing.
At least one of the defendants who agreed to an SEC settlement in 2018 continued to provide material published by Benzinga as of August 2023, through her financial communications company.
Plagiarism
In 2011 Benzinga plagiarized an entire op-ed essay from The Wall Street Journal written by Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr. Benzinga published this work under the pseudonymous byline "Patrick Harvard." Kerr's essay was published separately around the same time by Forbes.com under the byline of Benzinga CEO "Jason Raznick," who was among more than 1,000 unpaid Forbes "contributors" at the time. Kerr said subsequently of the plagiarism that he was "more amused and intrigued by this than annoyed or upset."
Further reading
Wade Cook
Oct. 20. 2021*
Kerr, Orin, Sept. 16, 2011 "Is Benzinga.com Just A Front for Plagiarists?" Volokh Conspiracy (law blog) Benton, Joshua, Feb. 9, 2022 "An incomplete history of how Forbes.com became a platform for scams, grifts and bad journalism" Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard University Fortson, Danny, "D-list actress ‘ran fake news scam to push up shares’" London Times April 16, 2017 Seeking Alpha The Motley Fool