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WSJ's Online Subscriptions Outperform Print
ScentCone writes "The New York Post is reporting that the Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, is doing much better with its online publication than with print. Online subscribers pay $84/year, whereas print subscribers are still paying $356... and the profit on the online business is 20 times that of the paper flavor." From the article: "'They're simply losing market share to other media. Print publishing is not a profitable business for Dow Jones anymore,' said Feinseth. Kann is hoping that the company's long-range growth also comes in online publishing, which has profit margins at least 20-fold higher than print. The Wall Street Journal Online is signing up thousands of new subscribers, up 5.2 percent for the quarter, to a total of 731,000."
The real information gathered from the story is that consumers buying Wall Street Journal online are paying 20 times too much. They should be paying $4.20 a year.
At least competition will help as if there is so much money in something then everyone will be doing it.
...and I would much rather read things online. Hell, I'd even pay for a well formatted paper to read on my Treo. But it just seems so archaic to watch all the people on the train in the morning attempt to fold their papers and still read while not disturbing the people they're crammed up against.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
It's only a short while til the NY Times, The Washington Post and other first-tier newspapers start charging for content. The only issue is which one will be first....
This makes sense to me, especially when you are dealing with the chaotic and capricious world of finance. It's nice to have a paper with you, sure, but with the ever changing world of business, you need to have now headlines now, and yesterday's news may be obsolete by the time it gets to your door.
Holy Crap that is expensive! That's like 422.05CDN, that's amazing!
But now that your average PDA is small than the magazine, and you can get the latest news online, not to save the number of trees you save, there's not really a justification for having paper publication of periodicals.
But I still prefer reading my books on paper. And most people I know feel the same.
Iran captures three CIA agents
How many people (like me) do both. Existing print subscribers can add the online service for $39 per year. I prefer to do most of my reading from the print version, but the interactivity of the online is also frequently useful....
Harldly anyone subscribes to print newspapers, the days of the paperboy chucking the sunday edition into your rosebush or onto your roof have been gone for a long while.
People just pick it up when they stop to get gas/smokes/coffee/whatever, or just read the copy lying there on the subway, etc..
This doesn't take those kind of numbers into account. That is, this isnt saying more people read WSJ online than they do in print.
If I were to guess, I'd say most would prefer to read dead-tree material than read a computer or PDA screen. It's just so much more comfortable for the eyes, and easier to take to the john.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The more publications go online successfully, the more demand there will be for ebooks and other portable reading devices, the quicker we'll finally get usable cheap ebooks.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Allow me to invent that aphorism.
(c) 2005 ites.
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
And that's only the subscriptions. Never mind the medium costs. Print costs are really expensive. Maybe some other Slashdotters would have better statistics available at hand, but I remember doing a print run of 1000 copies of a magazine with 32 pages in it for about $1000 (cdn). These days you can get free online webpages that'll handle bandwidth that matches that kind of distribution, whereas paper and ink costs haven't gone down all that much in the past few years.
It would seem that way, wouldn't it? But the reporting and writing that paper does is superior to just about everyone else. I'm willing to pay the amount they're demanding. Am I stupid? Maybe. But I think the other alternatives are definately not worth their price.
And I'd lik to add that I pay the newstand price ($1) because the WSJ is a data whore. When I did subscribe to them, my junk mail increased about three fold.
from your linked article:
:)
When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly today's crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, 'What's going on here?"' Bush said when asked about the rules at a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
wow. he started reading newspapers. impressive.
In December, Bush signed into law an intelligence overhaul that requires tighter border security against terrorists and was the basis for the passport proposal. The White House did not say why the president was unaware of the plans his administration announced just a week earlier.
FLIP-FLOP
Does the online WSJ sub include access to any sort of backissue archive or anything? Does that have anything to do with their increase in subscribers?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
All of these publications make their bank by overpricing their products to make even ripoff prices sound like a great deal. After all, why would any magazine give you a year's subscription for eighty or ninety percent below the cover price? Jack up the price on the cover so people think they're getting an amazing deal on a subscription while you still bring in large profits.
This is just the next extension. You think you're getting a great deal with your print subscription? How about an online subscription for even MORE savings?
I think that these online publications and their pricing schemes are only as successful as they are because they have such precedent as being a pricey product. It's why CD's are still $15, why purchasing digital music is around a buck a track, and why people buy books on amazon thinking that their 10% discount is amazing.
In relative expenses, print is so much more Capital Intensive compared to On-line. Not only that, but the turn-around required to post a story is faster with web-based publishing. Most economic projections show that charging 50% less for a yearly subscription for significantly faster news response is over 200% more profitable when going to a web-based readership.
They should offer a paid service for stories over 2 months old and delay stories by 15 minutes to an hour for non-subscribers. In addition, have specialized content for subscribers. With no required signup to see the free content, they would encourage people to check out the site. I believe they would end up with a decent return on investment.
In God we trust, all others require data.
People think the online deal is reasonable because it fits their lifestyle. Can't blame WSJ for charging what people are willing to pay.
http://nerdfortress.com/
but The Economist gives you a free online subscription with a print sub. The only thing the online has over the print is daily updates, which I don't use much. I'm too old to keep reading off of a monitor all day. /. reading does me in - ya know?
At some point CDs were cheaper to produce than tapes, but they still cost more. Same with online content, with an almost zero distribution cost. The pricing model isn't changed much even though the distribution cost changed radically.
As soon as the accountants and investment people see this, this wierd situation will be solved by their golden goose killing habits.
Their first thought will be "Let's raise the online subscription to $356, so our online profit will almost 100 times the paper profit!!".
Their second thought will be "This online thing was a passing fad anyway".
Circulation (i.e., dead-tree distribution) is expensive and most pubs do it at a loss, or at best break-even, based on the full cover price. But ad revenue is much higher for print than on line. An ad in the paper is much more likely to reach the target, hence costs more and is more worth it. An on line ad may be exposed to more eyeballs, but they are filtered by the frontal cortex.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
The reason the WSJ can charge so much for their paper and charge people for online content is because the vast majority of the subscribers are able to deduct the price from their taxes as a business expense.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I gave in this year and bought an online subscription to the WSJ after reading other people's leftover print editions at work for a while and seeing the quality of the reporting. I'm not surprised that their internet division is making money -- it's a great paper, and I am absolutely converted to paying for access online. I believe it's one of the only paid-subscription-required newspapers that is making money.
Contrary to what you might think, the WSJ is not a stuffy, uptight paper for rich white guys only. It's got lots of interesting people stories several times a week, technology coverage, and as long as you don't touch the editorial/opinion section, it's a great read each morning.
For my local news, next day delivery is just fine. I don't care if I don't find out about the 'Ladies' Spring Tea' a few days late. On the other hand, business information is the stuff of life and death. If I find out about a big deal a day after everyone else, I lose big time.
If I had to pick one publication that would do better on-line than in print, this would be the one. My local rag, on the other hand, does rather poorly trying to get an on-line edition to pay.
I wonder how many are people that converted from print to online access?
I worked for a small company, where we were profiled in WSJ. This was quite a big deal since our company consisted only of 5 employees at the time. We wanted to put the article on our website. WSJ informed us, licensing the article was about $500/mo. Seems kind of high since the article was already written, and we weren't reselling the article.
Nevertheless, we paid it for several months.
The WSJ is one of the last papers that doesn't simply reprint wire feeds to fill out 70% of their paper. They have mostly original content which people are willing to pay for, although the yearly fee they charge is far too high still.
While WSJ's "online operations" may have earned more money, this doesn't really mean much. It's "print" operations earned very little money. Companies have operations that lose money all the itme, so if the online segment earned a $1, it earned "more."
Moreover, I suspect the online operation benefits hugely from all the WSJ content generated for the print publication that I suspect is not included in "online operations."
It's comparably easy to make money when you get 80% of your content for free.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Online subscribers pay $84/year, whereas print subscribers are still paying $356
The WSJ only costs you $356 if you buy it from the newstand every day. Don't do that. In fact, you can get a year of the print AND online versions for only slightly more than the online versions. Check here for a $99/year deal. (referral-free link).
What I like about the WSJ is that, unlike in most papers where fact and opinion are combined through out all the news articles, the WSJ is pretty much straight facts in the articles and the opinions are relegated to the Opinion section. Don't get me wrong, I like reading the Opinion section but when it comes to news reporting, just the facts ma'am!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
...is advertising. Subscriptions for most major print newspapers are usually about 25% of the revenue. 75% comes from the ads. Paper versions have to strike a fine balance: keeping prices at a point where they are maximizing subscribers, the number and demographics of whom their ad rates get set. Production and distribution costs for a print paper take an enormous toll on their profit margins. Market forces will eventually drive large newspapers to non-paper versions. It's just a matter of time.
Evil sig is livE.
There's talk of how the e-WSJ is much cheaper to produce (no trees killed, no drivers to deliver it, etc.), but go into any bathroom at any brokerage firm and the stalls are littered with copies of it. The hard version makes the copy version cheap to produce because they already have the infrastructure available to easily produce it online. There aren't many web-only publication names that we trust, yet. The old school names legitimize the new school medium (WSJ, NY Times, Wash Post, AP vs. DrudgeReport). I'd be interested to see how accounting divides up the costs of reporters, editors, phones, office space, etc. between old and new media.
If each online subscription is 20 times as profitable as a paper subscription, then I think the online prices hould be cut by the amount of the extra profit. I'm guessing they'd make money on online subscriptions even at a price somewhere in the range USD15-30.
Has anyone else noticed that you can take nearly any URL from their front page, and read the article for free. Watch...
6 87 816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
0 51 4010687816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
B 11 1160514010687816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
:) Any volunteers to teach me? :)
Take this story for example, "GE'S NET ROSE 25% in the first quarter as nine of the conglomerate's 11 businesses logged double-digit percentage gains for earnings. The company also issued an upbeat 2005 outlook." The URL for that story is
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111160514010
which if you are not already logged in, takes you to the log in page. However, if you insert the word public before the word article like so...
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB11116
You are taken right to the story. Even better, if you make the URL look like this...
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/0,,S
You get the story with out any annoying information surrounding it.
Now if only I could find a place online that would teach me how to write an extension for Firefox that would add the word for me automatically so I don't have to type the word public everytime.
Enjoy!
Just that "20 times as profitable" figure. All that means is that the amount of the $84 that the WSJ keeps is 20 times as great as the amount of the $356.
What I suspect is going on here is that the meat of the WSJ's work, the researching and journalistic legwork, is only being counted as part of the print media division. The online division, with the 20x profit margin, consists entirely of "Take what the print division has already done and put it online". If a share of the actual reporting costs were put on the online balance sheet, its advantage would suddenly look much smaller. And if the print division disappeared overnight, the online division would shoulder the entire burden and lose that fat profit margin (and probably be unable to maintain that configuration and go out of business).
The Journal has a worldwide circulation of 2.6 million, each of whom are paying $356 a year for the privilege. 731,000 online subscribers paying $84 is not that impressive compared to that. In conclusion, online is *only* outperforming print in profit margin, not in any absolute sense, and as above online is still dependent on print anyway.
presumably your other account was modded into oblivion, looking at your posting history every one of your posts bar a couple have mentioned you mithuro site, are you really that desperate for hits ? perhaps a JOB would be a better use of your time
Suburbia is a wasteland where everything is far. You need a pack mule and a sherpa to pick up milk in Colorado. Elsewhere it requires a drivers licence.
Of course you get it delivered. The alternative is roadside chaos.
Would the fact that you CAN pickup the paper have something to do with it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Since my work provides the WSJ for free, I felt that puchasing it online was an additional expense that I could avoid. So, I killed my online membership. It was bizarre, WSJ called me morning, noon & night asking for me to 'come back.' So I said to them what I said to SBC when I switched to VOIP "could you take me off your call list & put me on your do not call list, please? Thank you. Buh-bye."
WSJ is worth every penny. No fluff, jus the facts. Friday offers a great personal journal for things over the weekend.
Student rate rocks! It's about $150, can't remember exactly, and you get BOTH the online version and the print version (delivered to the door). I'm currently pursuing my Masters and this is a great deal. Rock on WSJ!
Q: I am short, useless and provide no value. What am I? A: a sig
And getting their heads out of their ass-holes.
Since they have, unsuccesfullly, fought EVERYTHING to do with data reproduction ever since the invention of the player piano, I expect them to 'see brown' for the foreseeable future.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm not surprised, since the cost of getting that print copy of the Journal to the reader is large and the cost of getting the online version to the reader is negligiable. It's this cost that convinced so many publishers in the 90's, like all the computer magazines, to give all their content away online. Bad decision, if they had had the nerve, like the Journal, to make people pay for access they would have been better off.
Kudos to WSJ for making it work.
Many have criticized newspapers who charge for online access, saying it will never work, etc. On the other extreme you have websites that are "supported" by endless annoying popup and flash ads, or by making you look at the ad before getting to the page you wanted.
Some people don't mind paying for quality content that is useful to them. WSJ has realized this and tapped into a good market.
+2 Funny / Insightful. How long until lobbyists try to get secondhand reading outlawed?
This is great for niche publications like WSJ, who have content you can't find anywhere else (I know, I used to have a student subscription back when I was a sleazy business student). This won't work so well for the more mainstream publications like the New York Times or your local paper. There will always be free places like Yahoo! News that have the same content for free.
If I were running an online version of a print periodical, I would find the stuff I have that no one else does and charge for that. Interviews, analysis, exclusive columnists, etc.
Many papers are subsidized regionally, in the U.S. this is done through county and state taxes. For city papers, like the NY Times, they get some revenue from the State of NY for operations. I forget what omnibus act or something this falls under.
The point is... those dollars should be pulled and redirected into wireless infrastructures. Towns like Athens, GA - which tax funded the entire city for complete 802.11b coverage now have a public good - they don't need to fund extra garbage collectors for newspaper and recycling pickup - they can make the paper delivered on the web only.
The State of Michigan had the highest % of electronic tax returns in the nation. Nearly 80% of residents filed electronically. Factoring for those people who used H&R Block (which counts as an electronic file), shouldn't states like those be looking at massive wireless buildouts in the town?
I think small towns and municpalities which divert revenue from newspapers which serve the public good into wireless and internet access makes sense. They are more environmentally friendly and provide a type of infrastructure that encourages business to locate there.
The Metro, freely available on the subway is trash, absolute junk. Like broadcast television, it's just a medium used to convey advertisements to the public. All of it's articles are bought from AP/Reuters. Despite it's junky content, I often need something to read on the long subway rides. So, I would attempt to find something worthwhile in it. After a short while, I was so sick of the Metro that I wanted to buy a paper in protest--my attention is worth more than that. The problem was, the local paper was stuffed full of AP/Reuters articles as well. The WSJ was the only paper widely available that had better reporting. Since I'm not involved in finance, parts of the paper are pretty uninteresting to me, but generally, there's enough material worth reading to get me through my day's travel on the subway. So, now I read the WSJ on a fairly regular basis. I like buying the print edition at the stand, rather than getting a subscription, because I want it to be sold at the subway stations I use.
I don't subscribe to WSJ, but I do subscribe to Investors Business Daily. I switched to the online version as soon as it was available. Advantages and disadvantages are probably the same as online WSJ.
Benefits of online version:
0. Fewer dead trees.
1. No stack of old newspapers in my house.
2. I don't have to haul a stack of paper to the recycling center.
3. Available shortly after the markets close instead of the next morning.
4. I can read it with my breakfast without venturing outside in yucky weather.
5. If I miss a few days, the past week's editions are online.
6. I can download the PDF version to archive, view on my Palm, or whatever.
Disadvantages:
1. Dead tree version makes better kindling for the fireplace.
If God had meant for man to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it later in the day.
Both have their charm... recently I've been car shopping and find that the things that make online car publications vs offline decent apply in a similar way to magazines.
Online: Searchable, easy access to older/archive editions, instant-available, less physical item to carry around esp with multiple issues, easy to send to a friend etc in another location
Offline: Portable, doesn't need a computer, doesn't need power, can take it to the restaurant, bathroom, whatever. I can bring an ad to a car dealer and show them, or a magazine to a friend.
So, using the same kind of logic that the movie/record companies employ, each online subscriber is stealing $272 from the Wall Street Journal. They weren't going to pay for it, and yet they still get a copy.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Books are printed at ~15000 dpi. At that resolution density, the pixels from a typical 19" LCD display would give you rather under an eighth of an inch diagonally.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
All the major newspapers (NYTimes, Boston Globe, etc) out here on the east coast have started to see their online revenues outpacing the growth of the offline ones. This is a trend that will only continue as these sites become outlets for information not only via text but also audio and video. This truly is an age where TV stations, Radio Stations and Newspapers (the old media) are going to be going head to head with the Googles and Yahoo's (new media). I bet we'll see some consolidations and maybe even some more AOL Time Warner style mergers (could they really have had foresight?).
My 2 cents.
Online newspapers aren't that portable. I can take a print paper and read it at breakfast, at lunch at the mall, at dinner, I can read it in the bathroom, I can even read it in the car while sitting in traffic, or while waiting for a doctor/dentist, while waiting to get my car inspected, etc.
I can't do that with an online paper. My only options are reading it during the day at work (subsidized by my employer) or reading it at home on my PC in that room (subsidized by less time with my family).
Until electronic newspapers become vastly more portable (and I'm not talking about a tablet PC -- try taking one of those into a bathroom stall) there will still be a place for print papers.
The whole premise of the $4.20 is silly.
The original article (slightly misquoted by zonk) said "online publishing...has profit MARGINS at least 20-fold higher than print....Instead of paying about $356 a year for the print version... gettng it online for $84 a year."
If the print version has a profit margin of 2% (it doesn't sound like they're making much if anything on it) this would mean the online version has a 40% margin. This means a non-profit organization could not afford to sell the online version for less than $50.
If the print version has a profit margin of 1%--then you couldn't sell the online version for less than about $70.
Surely there are other people here who have had some P&L responsibility and know how silly this number is.
Sure, you can browse the internet while eating breakfast, but that's a good way to get your keyboard and/or computer ruined.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The WSJ has excellent reportage, although their editorial page is about as anti-environment as it could be. The fact that they can make more profit with online subscriptions than on more expensive paper subscriptions is good news for trees -- entire forests get mowed down to create newspapers that primarily contain advertisements nobody reads and get thrown out the next day. (Yes, I know newspapers can be made largely with recycled paper, but paper can only be recycled a limited number of times, as the fibers get shorter on each iteration.)
Your sig's quote was not invented by who you think it was. That quote is by Bender, from the television series Futurama. episode 1ACV02, "The Series Has Landed.
Only you can prevent misattributions.
I am consulting for a publisher currently struggling with declining print revenue and anemic online revenue. This board has been filled with some pretty hare-brained economics and misunderstandings of publishing. As previously pointed out, advertising is the profit driver for almost all traditional media, both published and broadcast. The web has added an unfortunate twist for those who sell advertising vehicles (newspapers, magazines, sit-coms, etc.). With the web you no longer have a passive audience, and you have truly measurable results. Advertisers are demanding that rates be tied to click-through performance, etc. Companies that get this will have staff who constantly tweak and optimize, making realtime advances in performance. Who knows if this will ever be enough? But if what passes for independent journalism in this country cannot make money, we will end up with the type of corporate journalism that dominates the television news, like the Walmart-ABC Evening News or the GE-NBC Nightly News.
The objective of a blog is to allow the author to argue his political ideology. That is it. Blogs aren't news sites. They're news filters. They scour the hundreds of articles a week and pick out the ones that either support their views, or strawmen they can easily vanquish. If you jsut read blogs, you are censoring yourself to a multitude of (opposing) viewpoints.
The irony in all this is that blogs do not hesitate to point out the 'biases' in mainstream news media, while they themsevles are ridiculously biased.
That 'dope' os 'sheeple' who only watches CNN is in a much better position to engage in political commentary than the 'enlightened' liberal who only reads DU or kos.
That's not to say blogs are worthless. Bias isn't necessarily bad, and more importantly it's unavoidable. Every mainstream news outlet has been accused of bias, from both side of the spectrum. So if you really want both sides of the story, don't look for bias, look for balance. Do what I do: Hit up mainstream news media, then hit up far-right blogs (LGF, powerline, National Review) then hit up far-left blogs (Kos, DU, indymedia).
Then you'll truly be informed. The only problem is most people don't like getting 2 opposing views because it's too hard to reconcile them (I'm experiencing this now with the Social Security debate). But that's the whole point of commentary to begin with.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Are either paid for by thier employer or is personally deductable from your taxes.
The WSJ is one of a few unique publications that fall into that category.
This model will not work for straight news organizations. Ad performance *is* possible for these organizations online, but almost universally they have done an incredibly poor job of presenting ads.
Remember, a huge number of newspaper readers, read the ads. The weekly ads for thier grocer, Fry's, classifieds, Lowes, and the one day sale at Macy's.
The organizations have got to figure out, (and google text ads really aren't the way), to present the ads that consumers want to see. It is there, but there is almost *no* innovation being done in this area, which is wierd, since it doesn't really cost them anything to try.
Having spent three years working at an online edition of a large newspaper, amy I add my 2 cents? Thanks. 1, newspapers make all their money from advertising, not subscriptions. The price you pay for the paper covers getting it to you. Have you ever seen the rate card for the WSJ? It is amazing what ads cost. Secondly, the WSJ's feature articles are great, take a while to read, and are enjoyable. Don't foget where the revenue comes from- subscription costs mean little. Plus keep in mind, that at many online versions of newspapers, they are separate business units and actually buy the content from the paper, a sister comany.
Almost every Harvard student was High School Valedictorian- After a year of college, half are in the bottom of the class
With only 731,000 online subscribers that is only a very small fraction of the online audience. If the WSJ had been free they could have owned the online financial/business news audience and made a forture in advertising.
Take your pick
Really helps knowing some of these when reading blogs. Some writers are notorious for using them.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I think that he was making a joke about your argument, though I'm not certain.
Put identity in the browser.
I think the money should be diverted back to MY bank account, so I can choose how to spend it...not you.
Not everyone uses/wants the internet. Indeed, not everyone reads/wants the newspaper. NO money whatesoever should be collected by private citizens to help subsidize private business operations. Everyone here gets pissed off by big businesses...well, why aren't you getting pissed off at the over-reaching politicians that take YOUR money and give it to these big businesses? It's not businesses that are the problem, it's an unconstitutional government.
I think, therefore I doh.
Yep, you got it in one.
Do I get some CANDY? Oh, I like candy! :o~
Put identity in the browser.