I am at the Future of Business Media shindig, hosted by Paid Content, and they’re playing a video with Jim Cramer talking to Larry Kramer.
Jim Cramer vs. Larry Kramer is really more about subscription vs. advertising models, with Jim being the founder of TheStreet.com and Larry being the man behind MarketWatch.com
Incidentally, today marks the 10 year anniversary of Marketwatch, founded by Larry Kramer.
MarketWatch, formerly known as CBS Marketwatch, operated in partnership with Viacom’s CBS News. Once a publicly traded company, MarketWatch was 45% owned by Viacom and Pearson PLC before Dow Jones acquired it in January 2005 for over $500 million. It came in a flurry of deals where print media bought up online assets (the other being About.com being bought by the New York Times).
Today Marketwatch is part of Dow Jones, who in turn belongs to News Corp. News Corp., of course, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Talking to people here at the Future of Business Media and just doing a lot of listening to the panels, it’s amazing to see just how much respect and props Rupert Murdoch gets.
There are very few doubters that think that his FOX Business Network will eat away market share from CNBC and then some.
There are few doubters that think that Murdoch will not only generate synergies to justify the 63% premium he paid on Dow Jones but will make it up financially, too. In an earlier panel, Alan Meckler, CEO of JupiterMedia Corporation argued that Dow Jones’ online assets alone will make that deal accretive over time, and you know what, he might be right.
Today the WSJ network greets 17M uniques, between WSJ.com’s 10M uniques and Marketwatch’s and Barron’s 7M uniques.
Ten years ago, on October 30th 1997, it had been 11 months since investors turned a blind eye (or deaf ear) to Alan Greenspan’s irrational exuberance warning, in fact, the Dow and Nasdaq continued to rise from that until 2001, when the Nasdaq crashed from 5,000 to 1,200 and the subsequent 9/11 attacks eviscerated a lot of the stock gains made up to 2000.
In 2000, there were 7M traders vs. 2M today, yet despite this, finance remains one of the most sought after categories amongst advertisers, and that explains the drive to open up WSJ.com to the public to chase ad dollars…
Finance’s allure to marketers explains both the $5B sale price for Dow Jones and TheStreet.com’s rising market cap, which now sits at $390M (though just last week it was flirting with $500M, eerily close to Marketwatch’s exit).
Of course, $500M in 2005 is not equal to $500M today… in 2005, Marketwatch did $80M in revenue, that same year, TheStreet did $34M, in 2006, it did $50M. What will it do this year? I don’t know, but I think TheStreet.com’s lag relative to Marketwatch will forever be tied to the former’s decision to focus on subscriptions while the latter embraced advertising, something that TheStreet.com investor Fred Wilson recently touched base on.
Times change, market sentiment shifts, but sometimes, the decisions companies make early on come back to haunt them years afterwards.
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