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Murdoch's New Internet Strategy for the WSJ

Posted by Zonk on from the strange-days-for-the-paper dept.

Reservoir Hill writes "Once Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Dow Jones & Company is completed later this year, Murdoch plans to provide free access to The Wall Street Journal's Web site, trading subscription fees for anticipated ad revenue. The WSJ web site, one of the few news sites to successfully introduce a subscription model, currently has around one million subscribers and generates about $50 million annually in user fees. Murdoch's decision to move to an advertising based model comes amid reports that newspaper's online profits margins are skyrocketing worldwide. Murdoch's previous internet initiative, his acquisition of MySpace has worked out very well. He actually first discussed this two years ago when he spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the role of newspapers in this digital world.""

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Idiots. they should have done it long ago by unity100 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the companies who would like to see their ad in myspace would pale in comparison to the ones that would put their ads on wsj. if they had done it long ago, they would have dwarfed that $50 mil buck a month for long now.

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    Read radical news here
  2. 50milj and nytimes URLs by siyavash · · Score: 4, Insightful

    $50milj is nothing for him. He rather open it up to masses so he can "reach out" with "right" information to them. ;)

    Also, I know it's offtopic but can /. please stop using URLs directed to nytimes? They all seem to need to login.

  3. Re:Are WSJ readers too dumb to use ad blockers? by SystemFault · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First, let me apologize for my sloppy typing and perhaps for an over-generalization.

    I have no objection to a *moderate* amount of advertising. I also have no objection to the Loch Ness monster, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy.

    Let's face it: most advertisement supported sites attempt to shove a hundred times as many bits of bandwidth consuming advertisements as compared to actual news text. That, along with pop up/pop under windows, cookie madness, and tracking -- well, is it really any surprise when consumers take measures to protect themselves?