Mr Murdoch reckons that the Journal could dominate the market for financial information online. A free wsj.com, he thinks, could attract 10m-15m regular readers from around the world (compared with 3.1m unique monthly users in September, according to comScore); the resulting increase in ad revenue would more than offset the loss of subscription income. Such a shift would be near-impossible to reverse. The Financial Times (owned by Pearson, part-owner of The Economist) recently took a step in the same direction, offering up to 30 free articles a month. But the FT will not go completely free, whatever happens at wsj.com. “We're confident in the value of our content and plan to keep subscriptions as a part of our online model,” says John Ridding, the FT's chief executive.
- The Wall Street Journal, Brace yourselves
1 comment:
FT is an innovative company that realizes that the top handful of websites take 95% of the advertising revenue and when WSJ goes free, that will just be even less for them. Subscriptions are the model the way to provide content and all companies that offer them are simply trying to find a successful way to do it.
Aggregation of content and services is the way to go. One membership with access to many sites ... think Cable TV model for Paid membership websites. OnScribe is doing it.
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