While there’s nothing earth-shaking about a financial news app (Bloomberg, TheStreet and others are in the game too), Seeking Alpha is worth watching because of its mobile strategy and the unusual model that drives its content curation — the articles are churned out primarily by investors rather than professional journalists.

According to founder David Jackson, the article pays $500 for an article that affects a major stock and $150 in the case of a small cap one. Other contributors receive smaller amounts based on how many people see the article. Jackson said by phone last week that the site paid out $800,000 to writers in Q1 of this year, while also “weeding out” list-based content.

From a strategic standpoint, Seeking Alpha isn’t trying to make money directly from the apps but hopes instead that the apps will juice sales of the site’s premium product.

“It’s a huge opportunity to take mind share in mobile. We can give away the content for free because the marginal cost to us is zero.”

The mobile content itself is a stream of one paragraph news summaries, a list of sector headlines and a portfolio page with stories tied to specific stock symbols. The fare doesn’t compete with “Angry Bonds” and other offerings from Bloomberg, which has its own app store, but is likely to prove a “good enough” solution for many investors.

Seeking Alpha’s push into mobile content comes at a time that  startups like Summly and Circa that aspire to make reading more efficient.

Jackson said Seeking Alpha, which is owned by three VC firms, has 110 employees but would not divulge information about revenue or profitability.

– What is Disruptive?: SeekingAlpha CEO David Jackson discussed how his company is changing the model of financial news, as the site aggregates content from more than 500 contributors, most of them bloggers. As Staci noted, a big part of what makes the site disruptive is its printing of conference call transcripts, which has opened up an entirely new avenue for investors to get to know companies. Jackson added that the key question any disruptor has to ask is “how do you compete with the Long Tail?” Either you’re category killer or a platform. SeekingAlpha, by aggregating long tail financial content is the latter Patrick Spain, CEO, Highbeam discussed the launch of the company’s new site Newser. “We’re trying to disrupt newspapers” by presenting news in a way that actually makes sense for the internet.

– Investing: Drew Lipsher, a partner at Greycroft, discussed what he looks for in a disruptive investment. “The consumer is the ultimate disruptor… things that we invest in are things that are helping to change the way consumers are consuming media.” “Fundamentally, you have to get a mass amount of people, you have to get them to change the way they interact.” As for lucrative exits, Lipsher noted that it might be getting more difficult, in part because strategic buyers, like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), have gotten more sophisticated about how much to pay for deals.

– Competition and First Mover Advantage: “At the end of the day, it’s about us being better at breaking stories than the rest of the industry”, said Rafat, in reference to paidContent.org and its competition. Scott Moore, SVP Yahoo, argued that Yahoo finance basically created the online finance industry and that Yahoo as a whole is still in an incredibly strong position. It gets lost that Yahoo is still #1 in several categories. Patrick Spain asked whether Yahoo could still be a disruptor, since it’s essentially an incumbent now. Moore argued that in the grand scheme of things, Yahoo still gets a sliver of total ad dollars and that there’s plenty more to take. In the meantime, it keeps innovating. Rafat also noted that disruption often is borne out of market downturns and often comes about accidentally.

– In five years, who won’t exist?: Spain: there won’t be any newspapers as we know them in 5-10 years.

Disclaimer: Greycroft Partners is also an investor in our parent company ContentNext Media.