MarketWatch.com sets traffic record in January

Here are comments made by News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson on the company’s second quarter earnings call:

At the Wall Street Journal, advertising year on year was softer. But the early signs for the current quarter are more positive. It’s worth pointing out that the Real Estate category showed significant ad strength this quarter, primarily driven in Digital by the recent launch of Mansion Global and in print by the Mansion residential section, highlighting the value that News Corp brings to Realtors and the efficacy of the relationship with realtor.com. We believe these complimentary platforms are clearly worth more than the sum of their parts.

Overall, Digital now accounts for nearly 50% of revenues at Dow Jones, with strong growth in the Risk and Compliance segment of our Professional Information business and healthy progress in the pursuit of three million subscriptions at WSJ and Barron’s within three years.

Specifically at the Journal, there was an 18% year-on-year growth in digital-only subscriptions for the most recent reported quarter, reaching 819,000 subscribers. As well, ARPU is on the rise. So these are not deeply discounted inevitably promiscuous subscribers.

I would also point out that the Dow Jones financial site MarketWatch set a new traffic record in January, with more than 23.3 million unique visitors. MarketWatch also had 1.2 million video starts for the month, which is a more than 460% jump year-over-year, while total visits to the site were a record 60.1 million.

Read the entire conference call here.