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.

The site began paying its writers back in January, a year after Seeking Alpha raised a $7 million second round to build up its sales team.

The idea behind paying bloggers was intended to encourage original posts that were not available for free anywhere else, Jackson told paidCcontent. In essence, while no financial services professional would likely to be able to quit their day job by blogging for Seeking Alpha, it does provide a nice little bonus for articles that might otherwise just be published in an investment newsletter. In any case, the paid bloggers certainly managed to produce a lot since the start of the program, as Jackson provided a rundown of stats:

– Seeking Alpha has over 4,000 contributors, of whom roughly 1,000 contribute articles each month.

– In the past six months, there have been 8,985 articles from the nearly 550 contributors that have participated in the revenue-sharing program.

– Seeking Alpha’s revenue sharing program pays bloggers $10 per thousand page views.

– Average payment per article in Q1 and Q2 was $58.(Jackson points out that that articles keep earning income “forever,” as long the posts keep getting traffic, so the average rises over time.

– For the first half of this year, Seeking Alpha paid out $517,585.

– Seeking Alpha claims about 5 million monthly uniques, according to Quantcast figures. It has 760,000 registered users on the site.

“We’ve done almost nothing to publicize the program; most people don’t know about it,” Jackson said in an e-mail conversation. “But we’re noticing that word is getting out that a growing number of people are making serious money from the program, so the number of contributors is rising.”

He added that partnering on revenue is one part of the package of benefits that Seeking Alpha provides. “For many contributors, the exposure they get and the resulting customer leads to their businesses (e.g., money management and research) are far more valuable; others most appreciate the prestige of being highly ranked or the discussion about their ideas by our community (55,000 comments were written on Seeking Alpha last month),” Jackson said. “The Premium Program has therefore worked particularly well for contributors who know a lot about stocks and companies but don’t have money management or research businesses. For example, retired professionals and individual traders and investors.”

Looking at the offer that Seeking Alpha makes to its contributors, it’s natural to think of the criticism that Huffington Post has increasingly been hit with since being acquired by AOL (NYSE: AOL) several months ago. As founder Arianna Huffington has generally argued, HuffPo provides the promotional value that it provides by offering contributors a chance to be seen by the more than 20 million unique monthly visitors. Seeking Alpha is much more niche than the widely generalist HuffPo is. But it does have a certain value for a tight audience of financial service firms, investors and public companies.

Unlike HuffPo, Seeking Alpha’s program is aimed at those who are already making money from their posts or from businesses related to their articles. Secondly, HuffPo has no plans to offer a subscription- or premium content model in the way that Seeking Alpha has. As sites that have tried paywalls have found, unless its a major site with original content like the NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT), success for premium models is typically the province of financial sites, where companies will often cover the cost of subscribing or individuals feel that paying for financial information is directly attributable to their ability to make money from the market. And that’s a big reason that Seeking Alpha can feel confident about expanding its revenue sharing for blog post initiative.

– Updated: Reuters (NYSE: TRI) finance Felix Salmon has contributed to Seeking Alpha in the past and he is not too impressed with the revenue share program. Whether as a financial incentive, he finds little evidence of anyone making serious money, nor does he feel that Seeking Alpha’s traffic has benefited as a result.

“From Seeking Alpha’s perspective, the premium-post program has delivered 8.6 million pageviews per month on average,” Salmon writes. “That compares to total monthly pageviews of 51 million per month, down from 63 million in April. An important part of the whole, to be sure, but still pretty marginal, considering that without the program, most of those posts and pageviews would have appeared in any case. And in terms of marginal extra unique visitors, the numbers are surely minuscule: very few people will have visited SA as a result of the premium program who would not have visited otherwise.”

As Seeking Alpha CEO Jackson said above, the company hasn’t done too much marketing of its premium post program, though he said he is looking to expand the number of paid bloggers. And it bears repeating that the company isn’t making any vast claims or suggesting contributors quit their day jobs. Even though the program is small, paying out $1.2 million is noteworthy, and certainly more than a lot of other sites offer to their contributors.

Jackson also says that the fast-growing site can, for the first time, afford to pay contributors a “meaningful” amount. Seeking Alpha has about 3.4 million unique visitors a month, up from just over 2 million a year ago. And, it used part of the money it raised in a funding round last year to build up its sales team.

The site will pay contributors $10 per 1,000 page views their posts generate. An average entry on Seeking Alpha gets between 3,000 and 4,000 page views, although there’s huge variation, Jackson says. He would not say how much Seeking Alpha charges advertisers on average to place ads, but he says the company is handing contributors an amount that is greater than Seeking Alpha’s own take. And he notes that the payments are significantly higher than those offered by other companies that pay contributors for content, such as Yahoo’s Contributor Network, which offers writers at most $2 per 1,000 page views, in addition to a small upfront payment.

Jackson says many of Seeking Alpha’s contributors are money managers who post on the site in hopes of gaining leads for their businesses. But he hopes that others — including those who are personal investors — will be attracted by the payments and will contribute to Seeking Alpha instead of setting up their own blogs. (Contributors can choose to designate their payments to a charity if they don’t want to be paid). The total volume of content on the site won’t necessarily change since the editorial staff selects and vets submissions before they are posted.

Seeking Alpha’s announcement comes only three days after sports blog network Bleacher Report also said it would pay some contributors for the first time in an attempt to drive deeper coverage of particular teams and specific coverage areas. Read our analysis of the two decisions here.