WSJD conference boosts circulation, ad revenue

The Wall Street Journal’s year-old print, digital and conference platform for technology coverage, WSJD, drove nearly 5,600 new subscribers to the Journal in 2014 while also boosting advertising revenues, reports Joe Pompeo of Capital New York.

Pompeo writes, “WSJD was born of a divorce between the tech-reporting and conference outlet AllThingsD and the Journal‘s parent company, News Corp. After their contract expired, the founders of AllThingsD launched a new site called Re/code with backing from NBC Universal, and the Journal launched WSJD, staffing it with about two dozen journalists to fill the void in-house and become a new player in the increasingly competitive landscape of technology coverage.

“Baker wrote in his memo that WSJD ‘generated more ad revenue than its predecessor website,’ which must be a welcome development for a newspaper where total advertising revenues were down in the high single digits during the first fiscal quarter of 2015.

“Those few thousand new subscribers are good news, too, as the Journal and other major newspapers are aiming to shore up the revenue they get directly from readers.”

Read more here.