The Wall Street Journal-20080125-WSJ-com to Retain Subscription Component
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WSJ.com to Retain Subscription Component
The Wall Street Journal's Web site, WSJ.com, will keep a significant portion of its content behind its paid-subscription wall, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said yesterday.
Speculation had been rife in recent months that News Corp., which owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal, would make WSJ.com a completely free site. Mr. Murdoch had signaled he was contemplating dropping the subscription model to broaden the Journal's online audience and boost its Web-advertising revenue. This, he said, could offset any loss in subscription revenue.
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."
The mix of free and paid content will continue to be tweaked, however, and a good portion of Wall Street Journal content increasingly is available free online. Free content includes the Journal's breaking-news alerts and personal-finance and lifestyle content, as well as videos, blogs, podcasts and other interactive elements. This month, the Journal began offering free access to all of its Opinion section.
Online-only subscription prices are expected to jump $20 to $119 a year as early as March. Print subscribers pay $49 a year for a subscription to the Web site. The last price increase came 18 months ago. As recently as this week, the Journal was offering online-only introductory subscriptions for $79 to bring in new subscribers, a common practice in the publishing industry. The bundled online-print price isn't scheduled to increase.
For the past several months, the paper also has run a test with Google News: Online readers can come to the Journal's site from Google News and read any individual article free but are blocked from entering many other parts of the site. The goal is to capitalize on the traffic that comes from search engines and let users sample the Journal to encourage them to subscribe.
"The key thing is, we want to make sure as we continue to evolve the site that nonsubscribers are able to come and have a very good experience," said Todd Larsen, chief operating officer of Dow Jones's Consumer Media Group.
The online Journal is one of only a handful of large, mostly paid journalism sites on the Web. When Mr. Murdoch raised the idea of going free before News Corp.'s completion of its $5.16 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. last month, it ignited much debate about the wisdom of such a move.
In November, Mr. Murdoch said to Australian shareholders at a meeting in Adelaide: "We are studying it, and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million [subscribers], having at least 10 million to 15 million in every corner of the earth, keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world."
But before the merger was completed, some executives at Dow Jones were arguing that there was value in charging at least for parts of the site. Even with a fee, it attracts more than one million subscribers and 10 million monthly unique visitors, according to internal company figures. (Nielsen Online, one of several firms that measure Web traffic, says the Journal's Web site attracted 5.4 million unique visitors in December, more than double the same month in 2006.)
These executives, and some analysts, contended that the Journal would have needed to significantly boost its audience to generate enough ad dollars to make up for the loss in subscription revenue. Moreover, advertisers now pay a premium to reach the Journal's online audience on the theory that users are more committed because they are paying. These advertisers might not have been willing to pay such lofty rates to reach a larger, but less loyal, nonsubscriber base. Nonsubscribers also spend less time on the site. Offering all the Journal's content free online also could have cannibalized print subscriptions.
WSJ.com generated about $60 million in subscription revenue last year, according to people familiar with the matter. To make that up in ad revenue would require the Journal to increase traffic to its site to well north of 20 million monthly unique visitors. That could be difficult. Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo News, the largest news site on the Web, attracted 35.4 million unique visitors in December, according to Nielsen.
