Wall Street Journal is one - if not the - strongest brands in business news. It’s so strong, that despite being in the increasingly troubled print business, its parent company Dow Jones (also publisher of Barron’s and Marketwatch) fetched a 63% premium in Rupert Murdoch’s $5B offer.
The company’s newspaper is doing fine, thank you; the website subscription business at WSJ.com has the strongest subscription business online, but let’s face it, while newspapers like New York Times and magazines like Forbes have embraced an open strategy and seen online advertising take off, WSJ.com has hitherto lost out on gaining any real meaningful exposure to online advertising, a $17B business in the US, and one that generated $10B in the first six months of this year.
Of course, that’s where Marketwatch and Barron’s come in, and it’s important to take a step back and really see what is underneath Dow Jones’ hood when one realizes what News Corp. will probably end up doing with its most recent acquisition.
Staci Kramer sat down with Gordon Crovitz, publisher of The Wall Street Journal to talk about the fine brand, the great company, and his new ambitious boss that commands such a grip in the global media business in the areas of film, publishing and web.
It’s worth noting that unlike a site like TheStreet.com that also adopted a closed, subscription-based model, Marketwatch went free and was ultimately the winner, selling for upwards of $500M to WSJ. At the time, some felt the deal was pricey, but today the site generates 7.5M uniques per month and a large percentage of pageviews.
WSJ.com gets 10M and the WSJ Network - which includes Marketwatch and Barron’s - gets 17M uniques.
I will say this: Crovitz seems very open-minded and goes against the stereotype of the clueless print executive, but that speaks volumes about the strength of WSJ’s online business. But that being said, he is keeping his cards close to his chest in terms of both News Corp.’s plans for WSJ.com, its partnership with CNBC and what integration Marketwatch, Barron’s and WSJ will have with News Corp.’s recently launched FOX Business Channel.
But while many people naturally assume WSJ’s brand will be leveraged to springboard FOX Business Channel, I personally think Marketwatch might be an easier fit for no other reason than Marketwatch has since its beginning and CBS pedigree (CBS was a joint partner in the site until WSJ bought it) focused on audio and video integration into a text-based site…
One thing, and I am guessing here, is that the inner circle of Rupert Murdoch has little idea what the right strategy will be with just how free WSJ.com should become, but what I see is that they will try a number of things and won’t really refrain from going all the way to ensure that in 1, 3, 5, 10 years, WSJ.com is commanding a healthy chunk of global online advertising revenues.
Raf just stepped up to me and asked me if the question we’ve all wanted to hear has been asked. Nope, I tell him, please do, and thankfully, he does:
When will WSJ.com become free?
“I think… first of all, as anyone who uses Google, or Paidcontent will know, a lot of paid content is available to non-subscribers… we all looking at the question of what is the ideal business model or journal content, it’s under discussion, we’ve had a hybrid model and are looking at increasing ability, as we’ve shown with a 25% growth in subscribers as we’ve added more content… we will see how much we need to go outside of the firewall and what the future holds.”
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