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November 14, 2007


Better Late Than Never

Murdoch Sees End to Journal Web Fees

“‘… we expect to make [wsj.com] free, and instead of having one million [subscribers], having at least 10 million to 15 million [visitors] in every corner of the earth, keeping up-to-date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world,’ Mr. Murdoch told Australian shareholders at a meeting in Adelaide.”

If the Wall Street Journal online had been free from day one, both Cramer’s baby, thestreet.com, and marketwatch.com never could have been built. Dow Jones paid half a billion dollars for MarketWatch, just to watch it die — what a waste. Anyone care to quantify the opportunity cost of the terrible decision by DJ management to make wsj.com a subscriber-only site?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 10:36 am (utc+8) and is filed under Internet/Media.

7 Responses to “Better Late Than Never”

  1. CapitalGain said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    I just wonder where the content creation business is going. It doesn’t look good.

  2. C. Maoxian said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 10:58 am

    CapGain: I assume you’re referring to content creation outside of maoxian.com. :-)

  3. CapitalGain said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Of course :>)

    World class content costs alot to produce. What is lost in paper circulation and ad revenue will need to be gained in on-line advertising.

    I hope it works out that way, or we’ll all be worse off.

  4. C. Maoxian said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 11:23 am

    CapGain: Well it costs a lot less than it used to and we’re all better off in the digital age.

  5. CapitalGain said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 11:32 am

    Raw data, public and published information is indeed easy and cheap to aggregate. It’s the human content side of the business that is time consuming and costly to produce, and there are fewer and fewer people in that business every year.

    I still like the feel of my newspapers.

  6. moom said:
    November 14th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    Also see the annoying Australian Financial Review Website. Even without paying the website is annoying waiting for stuff to load. OTOH News Corp really mucked up The Australian website recently. I’ve switched to reading the Sydney Morning Herald online as it is much easier to find the latest articles. SMH and AFR are both Fairfax newspapers.

  7. One Way Stox said:
    November 15th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    alls I know is that I wish INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY were free online.

    www.investors.com

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