360,000 downloads in three weeks of WSJ iPhone app

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch disclosed the following during the company’s conference call on Wednesday:

“We are seeing strong growth at the WSJ.com, as measured by our internal metrics. We had 13.4 million visitors in April last year, whereas this last month, we had 26.5 million visitors. Ad revenues for the site are forecast to rise 20% year-on-year in the fourth quarter. In just three weeks, 360,000 people have downloaded the Journal’s iPhone mobile reader. As you can imagine, we will soon be making them pay handsomely for the privilege of accessing the world’s best business news source.

“If it is possible to charge for content on the web, it is obvious from the Journal’s experience. We are now in the midst of a [proper] debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers the current model is malfunctioning. We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues and returns for our shareholders. I can assure you we will not be feeding our content rights to the fine people who created the Kindle. We will control the prices for our content and we will control the relationship with our customers. Any device maker or website which doesn’t meet these basic criteria on content will not be doing business long-term with News Corporation.”

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