Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) showed improvement in what turned out to be a busy fourth quarter—acquiring the rest of Factiva, selling some regional papers. Excluding singular events, the company turned in earnings of $39.9 million, or 47 cents per share, up 14. 6 percent from $34 milllion, or 41 cents per diluted share, in 4Q05. Revenue rose 6.1 percent to $485.4 million from $457.5 million the previous year. Some details from online actvity:
—Total circulation revenue for WSJ and Barron’s online editions was up 21.5 percent for the quarter.
—The circulation numbers for the two subscription services is a little complicated since Barron’s was folded in to WSJ prior to 2006. Paid subscribers to the Online Journal hit 811,000, up 5.6 percent. Barron’s Online has 73,000 subs. Combine, the company says the two showed a 15.1 percent increase in subscriptions from 768,000 in the same quarter last year.
—Dow Jones Online ad revenues were up 23 percent for the quarter and 21 percent for 2006.
—Monthly uniques are down for WSJ.com and MarketWatch but page views are up 8 percent. Overall, the total number of monthly uniques for Dow Jones Online was down to 7.1 million from a little over 8 million in the same quarter last year. MarketWatch dropped to 4.58 million from 5.4 million; WSJ.com to 3.1 million from 3.7 million.
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Update: I asked a company spokesperson about the traffic drops. Turns out the 11 percent decrease reported by Nielsen Net/Ratings doesn’t match the company’s internal numbers from Omniture, which show uniques have increased more than 10 percent and “like many other publishers we are working with Nielsen to investigate these ongoing discrepancies.” The comopany offers some other Nielsen numbers though—page view growth, up 8 percent, and time spent, up 7 percent.