WSJ going free
This is pretty interesting - Murdoch just dropped the bomb that he’s intending on dropping the paywall in front of the Wall Street Journal online. With paywalls dropping like flies it seems like everyone’s going hard after that sweet advertising money. More eyeballs, more traffic, more ad impressions and more click thru’s. I’m sure all the Web2.0 talking heads are feeling very validated now.
I wonder if WSJ will go with the NYTimes’ free registration model so they can sell their demographics to advertisers or if they’ll just go full frontal with it and expose everything to everyone. That had to be a tough decision to make, in any event. Apparently they’re raking in $50 million in subscriber fees. Of course, once they’re free the hordes will come - even with the paywall up too many times I’ve come up on a link to a WSJ piece that I couldn’t see - how much more will it be now that everyone will have access? I was on the verge of breaking down and getting my own sub.
Of course, part of the popularity is that the economy’s been booming and everyone’s been cashing in. I wonder with the economy less booming and possibly going into a steeper decline and housing dropping like a rock (except in nyc, grrr..) if the demand for a free wsj might be less than it might have been a couple years ago. Also, if the economy does tank will online advertisement dry up at all? Look at the banks, they thought those crazy sub-primes were like their own personal ATM machine and now E-trade’s about to go bankrupt. Most of the websites around the world look at online advertising as their cash cow - is it possible that it could stop being so free with the milk? I think anything drastic is pretty unlikely, and even in an advertising downturn sites like wsj and nytimes would be best suited to weather it, but I’m just saying.
