WSJ is behind others online

Sramana Mitra writes on the Seeking Alpha web site that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will need to overhaul the Wall Street Journal’s web operations to make it the No. 1 business news site if he is successful in acquiring Dow Jones & Co., its parent.

Mitra wrote, “Even though, they own the The Wall Street Journal, America’s most important business newspaper and website, they have not been able to capitalize on the brand enough amidst upheavals due to the Internet. Murdoch sees the opportunity to build a global Business & Finance brand, and there is clearly no other brand as powerful in the category as WSJ.

“CNNMoney, Time Warner’s Business and Finance site, for example, is #1 in the category in terms of Unique Visitors (8.2 M vs 3.4 M for WSJ.com), Page Views (145 M vs 51 M for WSJ.com) and Gross Usage Minutes (140 M vs 56 M for WSJ.com). Other sites like Forbes.com and McGraw Hill’s Businessweek.com also do better than WSJ.com in terms of Unique Visitors. Forbes even has better Page View statistics. Marketwatch, however, is also a Dow Jones property and does quite well, appearing at #3 in all 3 categories. In fact, the combination of WSJ.com and Marketwatch gets quite close in numbers to CNNMoney, which itself is a combination of all of Time Inc.’s Business & Finance imprints (Fortune, Business 2.0, Fortune Small Business, CNNMoney, etc.).

“A simple yet profoundly impactful strategy would be to blend Marketwatch into the WSJ brand and present it as a unified media property. Other things that Murdoch would obviously do is leverage his experience in television and make it a multi-channel, multi-media outlet. These are obvious next steps.”

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