A focus on digital delivery

Suzanne Bearne of New Media Age interviewed Alan Murray, who oversees The Wall Street Journal‘s online growth, including its expansion of video shows on its website.

Here is an excerpt:

Last month you launched WSJ Live (an interactive video app for the iPad, internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes), why is video such an interesting area and how has the take up been?

We’ve been building up live videos for about two years, up to the point where there’s several hours [of video] on the site everyday. We decided about a year ago, after the iPad came out, that it’s clearly a great format to watch video on. We decided on a video-only app. It’s becoming clear that TV and internet are about to collide.

Also, IPTV services were starting to grow very rapidly so we decided to design something for the iPad, which would also work for most IPTV platforms.

We had over 100,000 downloads [of WSJ Live] in the first three weeks. For a while it ranked as a leading news app. One of the things that’s interesting is that [visits to] our sites generally go down on weekends, but we’ve seen visits to the Live app go up on weekends.

What are are you focusing on within digital?

Our plans for growing our digital business over the coming years really rest on four prongs – video, mobile, social and local.

What’s unique about WSJ Live is that you’ve got live and on-demand content. Most of our traffic will be on demand but live pieces make it an interesting and unique offering. We’re going to keep pushing to expand that and are launching live shows in Europe and Asia in the coming months.

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