Nick Tabakoff of The Australian newspaper reports Wednesday on his interview with Les Hinton, the new CEO of Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, and says that traffic to the paper’s web site is up 40 percent from 2007.
Tabakoff also reports that Hinton is unlikely to make the paper’s web site free anytime soon.
Tabakoff wrote, “The company had initially wanted to drop the subscription model because ‘we thought we could create a much, much larger audience for advertisers: that was the underlying logic’.
“Mr Hinton, one of Mr Murdoch’s closest lieutenants, who until recently was executive chairman of News’s British group, News International, said there were strong early signs for the hybrid model (part free, part paid) that the wsj.com had subsequently adopted, after making the online paper’s editorials, opinion pieces and video interviews free in January.
“‘In January and February we had over 23 million unique visitors to the site,’ he said. ‘So there are a lot of other people coming in there who find interest in it, and a lot of them aren’t actually paying customers, but they don’t get access to the core business content, which is the valuable bit from the point of view of businessmen who are willing to pay for it.’ Mr Hinton claimed the 23million unique visitors number represented ‘a 40 per cent increase year-on-year in actual audience’.”
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