Crovitz bullish about Dow Jones online properties

Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz and Dow Jones & Co. CEO Rich Zannino talked on the company’s earnings conference call Thursday about the potential that exists with its online web sites.

Crovitz said, “As we said, we will soon hit a million paying subscribers to the Online Journal. Barron’s Online, at well over 100,000, is now the second-largest subscription news site in the world, thus surpassing the Financial Times.

“So we’ve known with the Online Journal that we’ve had the best business site. We think we’ve had the best business model for it. The opportunity and the challenge now is can we be both the best and the largest? And at 10 million uniques for the online Journal, obviously a million of those subscribers, we’re on our way but we’re not the biggest.

“So is there a way to continue to expand our audience while maximizing the profitability of our online operations? We think there are some interesting opportunities to do that but I think it is important as outsiders look at our model, to understand that for many years now, we’ve had a hybrid model where most of our unique users, even before the acquisition of MarketWatch, have been to open content, even as we’ve had very fast-growing number of subscribers to the online Journal.

“So we’ve had the best of both worlds. We’re now very focused on how do we also be the largest source of business and financial news online.”

The full transcript can be found here.