Zannino: Dow Jones will focus more on online offerings

Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino, speaking at the Software & Information Industry Association conference, said Tuesday he expects the company’s print operations to account for less than 60 percent of total revenue this year, and that the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s will eventually derive less than half its revenue from print.

Louis Hau of Forbes wrote, “Some of Dow Jones’ free sites, such as the WSJ.com-linked CareerJournal.com, RealEstateJournal.com and OpinionJournal.com, ‘are not as large as we’d like them to be,’ Zannino said. In particular, the company sees ‘a big opportunity’ to build more traffic and ad inventory at CareerJournal.com, he said.

“WSJ.com has about 800,000 subscribers who play $99 a year for access to the site; after factoring in discounts, they generate about $50 million a year, Zannino said. The site, along with its related free sites, generates ‘another $50 million or so’ in advertising revenue, he said.

“‘We don’t think we’d do more revenue if we abandoned the paid model,’ Zannino said, noting that while such a move would generate more page views and advertising inventory, ‘we don’t think we could monetize that inventory today.’

“Dow Jones is also pursuing more novel ways of generating revenue, such as through its partnership with Office Media Network of Chicago, which displays news reports from the Journal on flat-panel video screens in high-traffic office buildings.

“And in what he described as ‘an interesting twist on how to do a license deal,’ Zannino said Dow Jones has a pact with ‘one of the major cellphone companies’–surely he meant a wireless carrier–under which the company has committed to purchasing advertising in the print edition of the Journal in exchange for an exclusive licensing deal under which its customers can receive Dow Jones news alerts on their cellphones.”

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