Comments on: Free WSJ.com Would Need 12x Traffic To Offset Loss; DJ Buy To Shave A Penny From NWS: Analyst

By: Wall Street Journal Profile

Wall Street Journal Profile — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:18:23 +0000

$6 CPM is way, way, way low.

Who gets only $6 CPM nowadays? Hire me– I'll step in, slap some Adsense up on each page, get $10 eCPM & be the hero! :)

By: Newark Ohio

Newark Ohio — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:13:06 +0000

Hmmm… $6 CPM's are really quite low. I would assume if WSJ went free that the cumulative ad space on each page would increase. Seems like $6 CPM would be reasonably easy to achieve. I've heard some analysts state that $10-15 CPM is achievable from Google Adsense alone. Wonder why they used $6?

By: Tony P

Tony P — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:31:35 +0000

Now you can read WSJ for FREE!! Try it out: http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~panjiabe/?page_id=21

It works by ref spoofing.

By: Travis

Travis — Fri, 02 May 2008 04:34:03 +0000

I agree with James, 6$ CPM is not that low considering that advertising competition is making prices drop a lot. Now any web savvy person can start up an ad network which prevents such outrageous prices such as 90$ CPM from occurring.

By: Michael Carlton

Michael Carlton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:42:36 +0000

Michael Rodov makes the point very plain: it's the unique value that is the issue. Not the medium. And it's not only in WSJ online and print. The exclusive access to WSJ in Factiva is a critical driver of that product, which will presumably never get NYT or FT archives in future. And, of course, Dow Jones Newswires is a stand alone: unlike Bloomberg and Reuters' news services. So the WSJ is critical to its value too.
Murdoch's strategy appears actually to rely on moving further away from specialist business news and towards opinion-driving political agendas in a head-to-head positioning contest with NYT. In that sense, he's probably opening space for others to occupy the valuable position in business news. People like Morningstar.

By: James

James — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:20:17 +0000

$6 CPM may seem low, but it's not that low since the audience has been diluted and many of their key advertisers use ad networks which provide greater efficiencies, hence driving down CPMs for sites like WSJ.com. Note that "ratecards" can be very deceiving, so the $90 CPM for video likely includes additional impressions as added value which brings the net CPM down.

By: Michael Rodov

Michael Rodov — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:48:27 +0000

Who else wants to drink the kool aid? The error with this analysis goes beyond simply overlooking that "advertisers pay a premium for high end consumers (such as paid WSJ subscribers), and much less for general readers" as Barry points out above. The error is that this analysis is comparing CURRENT (paid & ad) revenue against POTENTIAL FUTURE (ad-only) revenue.

The future with advertising-only is bleak. If the WSJ increased its online audience by 100x on a free ad-only model, it still wouldn’t justify cannibalizing the $1B print (ad & paid) model. There is hope left in a future business model for paid content. It will come for publishers who have enough confidence in the value of their premium content to hang in there.

By: Barry Ritholtz

Barry Ritholtz — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:27:18 +0000

The error in this analysis is that advertisers pay a premium for high end consumers (such as paid WSJ subscribers), and much less for general readers.

By setting the WSJ totally free, Murdoch will giove up BOTH the subscription revenue AND the high end advertiser revenue that now graces the paid subscriber WSJ.com.

Sometime ago, I proposed a hybrid model: Move the WSJ/Dow Jones archives out from behind the subscription-only firewall. Keep the most recent WSJ subscription only — perhaps 30 days, but certainly no more than 90 days maximum.

That solves all problems nicely . . .

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/10/advice-for-murd.html

By: Greg Zorthian

Greg Zorthian — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:00:34 +0000

I don't think the lost subscriber revenue figure is correct. More than half of the WSJ.com subscribers are bundled with newspaper subscriptions and are either free or highly discounted. Therefore, the $79 per sub figure seems way too high, maybe twice what DJ is currently getting. Combine that with a higher ad CPM assumption and trade off of going free doesn't look as daunting.

By: mediastech

mediastech — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:57:43 +0000

Interesting.
The WSJ is already free here :
http://mediastech.com/index.php/2007/11/read-wsjcom-for-free/
:)