Categories: OLD Media Moves

DJX having lackluster results for Dow Jones

John McDuling of Quartz examines the performance of DJX, the Dow Jones & Co. product that was supposed to help it make inroads against Bloomberg and Reuters.

McDuling writes, “But sources tell Quartz that the introduction of the new offering hasn’t gone smoothly. Morgan Stanley–one of Dow Jones’s biggest information-services clients by contract value—recently scaled back its business with Dow Jones significantly, while the new product also received a lukewarm response at other Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs (although negotiations between the bank and Dow Jones are ongoing).

“DJX has been spearheaded by Dow Jones CEO and former Bloomberg Ventures boss Lex Fenwick. The web-based service combines all of Dow Jones’s newswires, its private equity and compliance databases, market data, and Factiva—which provides access to the news archives of a wide range of other publications—into a single platform. Subscribers also get market-moving headlines from the Wall Street Journal a few minutes ahead of non-subscribers. Previously, these and other Dow Jones services sold separately for varying amounts. Customers could buy just the ones they wanted without having to spring for a full professional suite of market news and data.

“But as Fenwick has explained, the old tiered-pricing model is no longer available. All firms are now charged the same amount:$249 a month or $399 month (depending upon the level of Factiva privileges) on a per-user, rather than firm-wide basis.

“One investment banking source, who declined to be named because of confidentiality agreements between the two companies, said the new pricing model had led to a ‘significant increase’ in the amount Dow Jones was seeking to charge its firm. ‘The feeling is that the Dow Jones product is much more limited than Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg’ this person said. ‘People are finding it hard to justify whether it’s worth it.”