|
WSJ.com
Subscriber wall: Soon to be a thing of the past for WSJ.com? |
It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that WSJ.com will be free soon.
Rupert Murdoch, soon-to-be owner of Dow Jones & Co. (parent of The Wall Street Journal) and overseer of the soon-to-launch Fox Business channel, has hinted at it several times now. No decision is final, but "the company doesn't feel it would hurt subscription revenues and ...any lost revenue would be more than made up from increased readership and search engine traffic," PaidContent.org reported. "Will you lose $50 million to $100 million in revenue? I don't think so ...If the site is good, you'll get much more," Murdoch said.
|
RELATED RESOURCES
|
Get E-Media Tidbits as an RSS feed:
* Copy this link and add it to your feed reader
Subscribe to receive E-Media Tidbits by e-mail:
* Sent Monday-Friday, 5 p.m. ET | |
Felix Salmon of Condé Nast Portfolio.com blames -- if that's the right word -- Google for all of this.
"When was the last time you saw a Wall Street Journal or Financial Times article on a Web search?" Salmon writes. "As people increasingly get their information from Google and not from home pages, the WSJ and FT websites have a choice: go free, or become irrelevant. The WSJ certainly can't be happy that Nick Denton, with his shoestring operation, gets more traffic, and more visitors, than they do.
"We'll see how long it takes for the WSJ and the FT to see the light. All that traffic from Google doesn't weaken the strength of the relationship between media companies and readers, it just changes the way that readers find their trusted content. If a WSJ story comes up top of a Google search, people will click on it because they trust the WSJ. And because people trust the WSJ, WSJ stories will come up top of a Google search. It's win-win for all concerned, and, yes, Rupert Murdoch knows it."
Let's just hope WSJ.com handles refunds to subscribers (like me) better than it handled its debacle in early 2006 when it started charging subscribers for a Barron's subscription that they'd already paid for. It wasn't pretty, but they eventually backpedaled and got it sorted out.
