News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson made the following remarks during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday:
Entitled digital paid subscribers at The [Wall Street] Journal were up 24%, so they’re now 62% of overall subs. We’re seeing a broad based interest in The Journal, obviously, it’s a business oriented publication, but also one with general appeal for a certain demographic and that is quite broad. The other thing to bear in mind with those subscriptions is that each of them is an opportunity to upsell to higher priced, higher yielding professional information.
From a broader perspective, our concern has not just been for publications, which of course is our prime concern, but also for an ecosystem, which was digitally dysfunctional, one in which premium content was actually diminished in stature by the very fact that in Google searches, you won’t basically able to find it. That has changed and we applaud that measure by Google, but as I mentioned, that’s really step one on the pathway to prominence. So we’re engaged and thankfully these days, unlike the past, many more publishers are engaged, not only in the US, but globally and also more governments are engaged in the debate over what the digital landscape should like. And with more focus on that ecosystem, more focus on prominence, there should be more opportunity for us for more profits.
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