Free the WSJ?
Much talk today on whether Murdoch ought to make the WSJ free, with a side conversation on whether WSJ.com ought to be free (My friend Mathew sums them up here). In some ways, the conversation about WSJ.com is an echo of the tear-down-the-paywall conversation about NYT Select from a few weeks ago. Gist of that conversation: tear down the wall, mainly just because. Or maybe don’t. it’s not clear.
There are certainly lots of people who think paywalls for online content ought to go. In some cases I do too. But I don’t put too much stock in the online popularity of that attitude – these are readers, after all, who want it free – so, customers, asking for the product for free. Big surprise there. The reason advanced is generally because free can reach a larger audience, and the supposition is that if one does, ad revenue may be sufficient enough to make the move viable.
If you’ve been paying attention to the many conversations online in the past few months about how hard it is to generate respectable revenue from online ads alone, you’re probably scratching your head right now wondering how to reconcile those two points of view. And the answer probably is, you can’t. Well, it’s at least certainly the case that you can’t without taking a serious look at whether a media property has any chance, given its content and intended demographic, of reaching an audience large enough and CPM-rich enough to deliver on the revenue it needs to pay for the content it needs to generate the audience it needs to … and so on.
I don’t know what the answer to that question is for WSJ.com. But I expect the question of what it wants to be, now that it’s grown up, will be answered early in Murdoch’s reign. And it seems to me that that question is the first one that needs to be answered, certainly before any decisions are made about paywalls. For my part, I think comparisons between the WSJ and the NYT, and just about anything else, for that matter, are farkakteh – the WSJ has much smaller reach, and reaches a different audience than the NYT, for example. I bet it always has, and I bet it always will – the inevitable result of serving a more niched audience with better (well, more niched and in-depth, anyway) content.
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The poor-university student in me says of course it should be free, I’m used to everything free on the internet. However, the journalist in me says it should stay behind the paywall. The WSJ is one of the few tradional media companies that has managed to embrace the internet and make some money from it. Many other newspapers are stumbling to keep up and only now figuring out the whole web thing. If anything, the WSJ is almost ahead of its time.
From an advertising perspective, I think they should remain a pay-site because they would be more appealing to companies. The people willing to pay for news are great targets for advertising.
I hate to say anything out loud that is disrespectful of something that is as big, loud, and just plain nasty as Murdoch, but has anybody noticed that his new flagship is just about to conform to the laws of capital as adumbrated by one Karl Marx. He, the angry old German with the lashing tongue, he said that capital would break though its private property boundaries with huge waves of productivity; that it would unleash, batter down, all existing barriers of gender, class, nation, and so on; he said it would present the drive to productivity as command to the capitalist with the result that capital became, in his famous phrase, its own gravedigger. Is Gates the last of a psychotic human type? Is Murdoch a characteristic example of the species acute, paranoid, sclerotic? Are these types historical minnows about to be swallowed whole by a really very big whale with Hegel stamped on its rump? Maybe we should preserve our traditions and take of few of these types, stuff and mount them in the Royal Ontario…..while they last..