Submitted by John Byrne02.06.2008
Thunderdome
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Betting closes on Dec 29 2008
Rupert Murdoch can change his mind, right? He figuring out a way not to forego all those lucrative online subscription fees and go for scale as well.
Current Community Consensus 19%Prediction Statistics
| Betting Closes: | Dec 28 2008 | Current Consensus: | 19.00% | Total Bets: | 100 |
| Today's Change: | 0% | ||||
| Life Time High: | 51.25% | ||||
| Life Time Low: | 19.00% |
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Times Select went away. WSJ has simply got to do this. Walled off subscriptions sites are going to lose money when you consider how the ad dollars are flowing to online businesses. And, even though leads are king, the more traffic you get the better chance you'll serve those ads and get those leads. Murdoch will change this, I'm certain.
They'll make more serving targeted ads to segmented users than they will off of subscription revenue.
Could be, but that's what the NY Times thought, too. Perhaps the WSJ has a more robust lead-gen operation that would be crazy to let go of at this point, i.e. a more targeted user base for vendors.
This prediction is already as good as dead so how about handing over the loot early. By way of evidence I offer the following quote from the Sun King from D6 quoted on paidcontent.org May 28, 2008
“When I saw how much money they were making, I changed my mind on it. People can pay a lot more than we are charging, from $50 a year to $150 million...We have 2000 great journalists....if we can’t fashion something great out of it, then we have something wrong,” he said, elaborating on the premium product that WSJ can build on. "
This prediction was made during the infancy of TIS. So, does the WSJ.com Mobile Reader (launched today) counts towards meeting the criteria of this early prediction?
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/mobile_download.html
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jMrhVuyIxkAKeG1N1kwB3ggJdc1AD92LER2O0
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1833955/
Quoting from the articles that David linked:
"although the company will eventually make some content available only to paying subscribers of its newspaper or Web site." (ap article)
"with full access to subscriber content for a limited time only." (tradingmarkets article)
Looks like the first crumbling of the wall, but it's not down yet.
This is a done deal for UNFAVORABLE judgment when betting closes (ROI=44 days). Murdoch made the following statement today.
"One way we are planning to take advantage of online opportunities is by offering three tiers of content. The first will be the news that we put online for free. The second will be available for those who subscribe to wsj.com. And the third will be a premium service, designed to give its customers the ability to customise high-end financial news and analysis from around the world."
Full article: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/stories/2008/2397940.htm#transcri...
Unofficially, one can bypass the subscription wall via spoofing as redirect from Digg or Google. However, this does not meet the criteria and spirit of this prediction.
David is right. Murdoch has made is clear repeatedly that the journal will not be free. In fact the sentiment is now switching pack towards paid content especially for Finance sites. I think this prediction is already dead.
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