Now that The Wall Street Journal is in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp crew, Murdoch has the power to make changes to the most powerful financial news publication at his own discretion.
And one of the first thoughts Murdoch has is making The Wall Street Journal free. The advantage of this is that the website traffic of The Wall Street Journal will likely shoot up.
But there are a couple problems with making the WSJ free. Fewer people would want the print version of The WSJ. And with fewer people wanting the newspaper, that would mean fewer jobs in the print department.
And if The Wall Street Journal becomes free, then its rival in the UK called Financial Times could feel pressured to become free also.
Dresdner Kleinwort analyst Usman Ghazi said: “If the Wall Street Journal goes free, the marginal buyer of the FT is going to say ‘hang on, why am I paying for a service I can get for free elsewhere?'”
The price of the online subscription of The WSJ is about $99 and FT.com subscriptions range from £99 to £400.
Polo Tang, a UBS media analyst has a different viewpoint than Ghazi though” “Even assuming a worst case scenario, where all these (Web) subscribers were lost, there would only be around a £7 million impact, suggesting only around 1 percent downside risk to group profits,” said Tang.
Fortunately, the digital ad market is still booming so there is always monetization opportunities for news brands.
