Dow Jones discusses its online publishing business (DJ 2Q05 conf call quotes)

Dow Jones (ticker: DJ) publishes The Wall Street Journal Online and MarketWatch.com. Comments from COO Richard Zannino on those businesses:

At Consumer Electronic Publishing second quarter revenue
increased 122% due to the acquisition of MarketWatch together with
strong organic growth. MarketWatch has exceeded our profit expectations
in its first five months of ownership and it was dilutive to Dow Jones
EPS by only about $0.01 per share in the second quarter. Excluding
MarketWatch, CEP total revenue was up over 20% in the quarter.

Paid subscribers to wsj.com at the end of the second quarter were a
record 744,000, up almost 9% over the second quarter 2004, and daily
unique visitors to the on-line Journal were up 19% year-over-year.
Including MarketWatch unique visitors were almost 9 million visitors in
the month of June.

We've combined the on-line journal and MarketWatch sales teams into a
unified Dow Jones on-line network. We're very focused on cross-selling,
and given our nearly 9 million unique visitors, we're also very focused
on reaching advertisers looking to reach this critical mass of high
demographic online users. We've already made some big wins. Oracle,
Sun, and United Technologies are examples of advertisers who are now
using interface targeting and buying MarketWatch in a substantial way,
for the first time…

 

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)