News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson made the following comments during its earnings conference call about the performance of Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch.com and Investor’s Business Daily:
Subscriptions at the news business are continuing to grow and during the month of January, average daily digital subscriptions to Dow Jones portfolio, including the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch and Investor’s Business Daily, reached over 4.9 million, which represents more than double the pre-COVID average level of 2.4 million digital subscriptions in Q2 fiscal 2020. The acceleration of digital subscription growth has been driven, in part, by the team’s bundling of products, which is designed to increase reader engagement and reduce long-term churn.
While we have purposefully shifted emphasis to recurring revenues at Dow Jones, we are happy to report that although we face some challenges in print advertising, digital advertising grew year-over-year for the first time since the first quarter of fiscal 2023. This positive result has been driven primarily by growth in the tech and automotive sectors, and most notably at wsj.com.
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