Posted on 08/10/2007 11:13:04 AM PDT by HAL9000
LONDON (Reuters) - News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch has said he might make the Wall Street Journal's Web site free, a shift that could compel Britain's Pearson to do the same with the online version of its Financial Times.Numis Securities analyst Lorna Tilbian said any move by Murdoch to make wsj.com free has to put pressure on Pearson, while Dresdner Kleinwort's Usman Ghazi estimates a potential hit of up to six percent on earnings per share.
"You can resist if you don't want growth," Tilbian said.
Wsj.com is one of the Web's most successful subscription businesses with a $99 annual charge and making it free would be aimed at lifting online ads from an anticipated jump in readers.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
In the old days public libraries subscribed to many newspapers. How about merely setting a count that would allow a given number to be connected free? If that became a nuisance for the reader s/he could always subscribe otherwise they could try later.
Hope I'm not just dreaming this.
When paid sites have gone to a free/ad-based model -- as CNN recently did with most of its video -- they typically stop selling new subs a few months before the switch, and then give pro-rated refunds to whomever is left.
They might offer a print subscription extension or some other non-cash alternatives that would appeal to corporate customers, who are, I'd imagine, a big part of their subscriber base. I don't know if the Dow Jones company has other paid-access services that they could credit with refunds from the WSJ subscription.
Me, Me, Me, is that all you think about?:)
It isn't a case of "this man" buying "a newspaper" -- its a publicly-traded corporation buying another. And anyone who wants to talk News Corp. shareholders out of buying, Dow Jones shareholders out of selling, or regulators out of allowing the sale has the constitutional right to do so.
That would be the worst of both worlds for the WSJ. They would lose the subscription revenue, but without gaining the eyeballs that would let them raise ad rates. Studies of user behavior are pretty clear that if users regularly can't get through, they don't try again later -- they try again elsewhere. Time is money, and an unreliable source is no source.
I wonder how much of the WSJ's subscription revenue comes from $99/yr. individual subscriptions, and how much comes from corporate site licenses. I believe that Britannica, the OED, and Lexis/Nexis make the bulk of their money from licenses to companies and schools.
The license costs a fairly tiny amount per desk, but for thousands of desks; the subscribers and providers both get more predictability. Nielsen has a similar model for media orgs, Medline for medicos, and so on. A lot of trade groups have databases that are free to members, paid to the general public.,
A bit of a digression, but I'm irked that CRS reports aren't all available in an easily searchable form online. For those unfamiliar, the CRS is a non-partisan office in the Capitol that researches and summarizes topics at the request of members of Congress. Picture something like a 20-40 page undergrad term paper. No, wait. Picture a *good* undergrad term paper, which most aren't.
When I worked on Capitol Hill, staffers could brows shelves of printed reports and walk away with as many as they could carry. I brought a few dozen back to school with me after my internship. Today, I'd imagine they're available on the congressional intranet, but access to them on the broader internet is spotty. Basically, they're available to the rest of us when a member of Congress chooses to post them on his own site. They're allowed to do so. But there is no comprehensive, searchable database of CRS reports.
They're no substitute for real research, but their sources are referenced and they're a good overview and starting point. And since they're prepared at taxpayer expense, they are not subject to copyright and ought to be readily available to everyone. I believe Newt Gingrich made some comments to that effect a decade ago, but not much came of it.
How about Barron’s free on line?
Hope I'm not just dreaming this.
Sounds great! Then I could post exerpts of articles . . .Would they merge opinionjournal.com into wsj.com?
I was remiss in not making it clear that the subscription service would remain as is.
For those of us without subscriptions we'd have access to the new "library" copies but we'd have to wait our turn. If that's not good enough then we would have to pay our money for a subscription.
I do not know Mr. Murdoch's reason for making it all free. I know that it was stated somewhere that NY Times' employees want the Times to be free to all because they feeeeeeeeel that the subscription service is stifling. They feeeeeeeeel all of America should have the advantage of their "enlightenment."
But my proposal may be unneeded for indeed as you pointed out, when denied access people try again elsewhere. So an alternate proposal, let goggle or YaHu! purchase multiple subscriptions to the WSJ if it's OK with their Chi-Com partners. :)
I thought that Murdoch could do something like this for several reasons. He is more interested in growth than relatively small amount of revenue that wsj.com brings in. Growth would allow charging advertisers more for eyeballs.
At 900+K subscribers at $100/$120 and counting the volume discounts, the online subscription revenue is likely less than $100M per year, from total DJ annual revenue of just under $2B. Consider the revenue Google gets from “free” access, number of eyeballs is, with very few exceptions, the only way to monetize something on the Net where everybody is looking for “free”.
Much of the content in WSJ online was available to the non-subscribers either through many columns made available publicly i.e. accessible without password, or same AP articles available elsewhere - in other words a lot of non-original or not otherwise valuable enough to subscribe. Most of the general and even financial “news” can be gotten on Internet within minutes from somewhere else, so all that remains is in-depth analysis and data in few original content articles available not long before it’s rehashed in another publication.
Another reason may be that the truly paranoid and technically lazy and illiterate way online.wsj.com was trying to protect its precious content from being “stolen” was creating not only real ill will among its customers when they couldn’t connect to either wsj.com or barrons.com due to crazy lock-out scheme that required a call to their support center to clear/resume the access (and wasn’t even available at night or on weekends) and carried very high cost of human technical support which could be better spent on increasing bandwidth and response time.
They can still charge for value-add services - I think some of the marketwatch.com services like real-time alerts are subscription-based, but I am not sure - but in general it may be a lot more valuable to them to get paid for eyeballs and try selling add-on services to larger audience which now can stay longer on the site and read AP along with “other” content on wsj.com .
Murdoch expects to make WSJ.com into free site
**************************EXCERPT**********************
By David B. Wilkerson, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:05 PM ET Nov 13, 2007
CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday he expects to make the Wall Street Journal's online edition a free Web site, moving away from the paid-subscription model it has successfully employed since its inception in 1996.
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