Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
subscribers are able to deduct the price from their taxes as a business expense
So? That doesn't make it free. It just offsets their income by a little bit, and they pay just a little bit less in taxes. It's still a net cost to the subscriber.
The reason people pay for it is because they find it directly (and often immediately - that day) useful to their business and investment decision making, and that pays back hugely in excess of the cost.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A good lesson for them to learn, though I would point out that the WSJ differential is 4, not 10. My guess is they wouldn't sell twice as many subscriptions at half the price. Still, that would put the price of an album on iTunes at $3-$4, not $10.
Even at that I'm not convinced that it would hold for the *AAs. The WSJ has a targeted, affluent market that would pay for convenience and timeliness. People don't share WSJ articles on P2P networks because not enough people want them, and those who do are more willing to pay for them. I'm sure there's a lot of cut-and-paste forwarding, and I wonder how much that cuts into sales. Perhaps some of those forwardees end up subscribing, because with news, timelineness is of the essense. P2P songs, on the other hand, will wait for a bit, and many of those downloads don't turn into album sales.
But we're discussing sales, not P2P, and the *AAs are already doing that in several venues, via iTunes and Real and Microsoft.
I do wonder about the numbers in the article. Are the costs of news gathering divided between the online and print editions? No matter what you do it still costs money to gather news and advertise your product. If the online sales get "free" content from the print division then their profitability numbers are dubious.
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.
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.
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Though just like with music, that won't make it any cheaper for the WSJ to actually gather and edit what it is they sell. So the lesson should be the other way around: the WSJ should be watching how quickly a popular bit-based info-product can get turned into a pirated, not-payed-for file that's passed around between thousands or millions of anonymous "friends."
Obviously people have been e-mailing snippets of paid-for WJS online content to their business friends since the day they went online. Because of the half-life of the information, that probably did a lot to encourage new subscribers. But in the sense that people can use back-issues of WSJ for research, they're probably spending a lot of time thinking of how to keep their intellectual output paid for. I suppose the good news for them is that it's (so far) mostly text, and it's real easy for bots to find that stuff infringed-upon on blogs, rss feeds, etc. But the more that their business depends upon the online model, the more they're going to have to be ready to play hardball if everyone in Hong Kong is boning up for the next day-trading cycle on a free "shared feed" of what hundreds of expensive Dow Jones employees just spent the last 24 hours laboriously putting together.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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.
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
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111160514010687 816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
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,,SB11116051 4010687816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
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,,SB11 1160514010687816,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
You get the story with out any annoying information surrounding it.
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.