Categories: OLD Media Moves

Why the WSJ.com should remain a pay site

Rich Smith of The Motley Fool gives some reasons why The Wall Street Journal‘s web site should continue to charge readers for access.

Smith wrote, “I won’t go into great detail here repeating my arguments against the wisdom of Murdoch’s decision to join the online journalism free-for-all. Basically, they boil down to:

Brand: People believe that ‘you get what you pay for.’ By removing the price tag that tells people what WSJ.com’s value is, Murdoch will devalue the brand.
Synergy: Charging for both WSJ.com and The Wall Street Journal proper allowed News Corp. to offer two-for-one pricing deals, using one medium to help sell the other. Making WSJ.com free continues the two-for-one tradition — except that now, it’s going to be ‘two-for-free,’ as the Journal‘s paying subscribers migrate to the free website.
Timing: Google, ValueClick, and Time Warner‘sÂ AOL had it pretty good for a while, capitalizing on a bull market for online advertising. But as fellow Fool Rick Munarriz recently pointed out, the ‘surge in ad revenue’ that AOL has been chasing is proving elusive of late. This market may have peaked already.

Read more here.Â

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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Dan says:
November 17, 2007 at 2:28 pm
I agree for those reasons and personal reasons. I do not want to be barraged by ads when trying to read and think about the articles and data in the wsj. I already detect an increase in ads in the print version. If the website is made free, the ads will increase and become the focus at the expense of the great journalism of the wsj. I hope this doesn't come to pass, but I am not sentimental and will drop my subscriptions if it gets bad. That would be a very sad day.