Every SEC filing became free to read in the mid-1990s, and EDGAR Online built a business selling them anyway. The raw documents were long, plain text, and hard to search. EDGAR Online added alerts, search tools, and data pulled from financial statements. In 1999 a new wave of individual investors was reading filings for the first time. EDGAR Online went public that May, aiming to be their guide.

Order From Public Data

Susan and Marc Strausberg founded the company in Connecticut in 1995. The SEC's own EDGAR database supplied the raw material for free. The bet was that public data became valuable once someone organized it. EDGAR Online tagged, indexed, and delivered the filings faster than the government site, in friendlier formats. It sold subscriptions to investors, lawyers, and analysts. It also licensed its data to websites and financial firms.

XBRL Becomes the Rule

EDGAR Online priced its offering at $9.50 a share in May 1999. The company never grew large. It spent years building tools for XBRL, a tagged data format for financial statements. The SEC later required that format, so the machine-readable data EDGAR Online had promoted became a regulatory requirement. In 2012 RR Donnelley, the financial printing company, acquired EDGAR Online. Its products joined RR Donnelley's financial services business, and the EDGAR Online brand continued for a time.

Cover: The Raven on the Bust of Pallas, Édouard Manet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Poe's raven (Edgar).