The WSJ’s new popout markets widget

Adrienne LaFrance of Nieman Journalism Lab writes about The Wall Street Journal‘s pop-out Markets Data window that puts a real-time markets ticker in the corner of your screen.

LaFrance writes, “It’s part of the newspaper’s ongoing ‘WSJ Everywhere’ mantra, and an attempt to keep readers connected with the Journal in an ever-fracturing and narrowing media world.

“The soft rollout was also a way for Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal’s digital network, to test a hypothesis. ‘Our belief is there is a group of people whose prism to the world is through markets and market data,’ Narisetti told me. ‘Let’s test that kind of theory and put this out there.’

“He says the results have been promising. In the first three weeks, the widget got 200,000 page views from 25,000 people. Not only were people taking advantage of an opportunity to pop out niche content, but they were staying with it, and coming back to it. Users can toggle between U.S., European, Asian, and foreign exchange markets. There are also tabs for rates, futures, and a customized ‘My Markets’ view.

“‘The interesting thing was that people on average were spending close to some 15 minutes on that,’ Narisetti said. ‘If you look at that across the site, it’s probably close to more than double the average because so much sideways traffic comes in. I don’t want to falsely assume that somebody who has popped it out has spent all that time looking at it but the fact that people are popping it out on a consistent basis and coming back to it suggests that there is a class of people for whom this makes sense.'”

Read more here.