I hedged quite a bit in writing about whether the Wall Street Journal could, should and would go free, rather than paid, noting a lot of IFs... They may be able to do it IF they're willing to forego more than $60 million a year in revenue for a few years. IF they can get enough synergies from other properties. IF they can keep their CPMs high enough even as they open the floodgates.
Now, it seems, those IFs are too substantial and the WSJ will remain paid for the most part. (And I guess I'll be re-upping for my $99/year.) There had been rumors of people holding off on renewals amid talk of the Journal going free, and speculation that going free would cut into not just the online revenues, but also a not-insignificant amount of print subs. (Another, probably more minor, complication would have been unwinding all kinds of others deals, from archives and current articles and headliens in paid data services like Factiva to the new subscription service on the Amazon Kindle and so on.)
No comments:
Post a Comment