Financial Times and CNBC May Begin Sharing Resources -- WSJ

The Financial Times and CNBC may begin sharing news resources in order to beef up both companies' sluggish web concerns, according to a report in Friday's Wall Street Journal. People familiar with the situation say one possibility is for FT to use CNBC video on its website, while CNBC would get access to FT's articles. Both websites have had difficulties getting users to sign up for their premium services. FT, which charges to read most of its articles, has 90,000 subscribers vs. Wall Street Journal's 931,000, while CNBC.com is only the 58th most-popular financial-news site with 823,000 visitors in May. FT is owned by Pearson plc, and CNBC's parent NBC Universal is owned by GE and Vivendi SA. Recently, NBC and Pearson considered a joint counterbid to News Corp.'s $5 billion offer to Dow Jones, but dropped the plan after deciding the price was too high. One reason News Corp. wants Dow Jones is to gain access to the Wall Street Journal (a DJ property) for the financial channel it's launching this fall that will compete with CNBC. The Wall Street Journal currently has an exclusive arrangement with CNBC to make its reporters available for programming and to provide it with news. If News Corp. were to succeed in acquiring DJ and the Journal, CNBC might look to FT to fill in the gap left by its departure. Sources said the negotiations were "highly likely" to lead to a commercial affiliation between the companies, but that there is no discussion of combining operations, and added an announcement is not imminent.

Sources: Wall Street Journal
Commentary: What Is CNBC .com Thinking? • Dow Jones/News Corp. Merger Unlikely to Succeed • GE and Pearson Will Not Pursue Dow Jones
Stocks/ETFs to watch: Pearson plc (PSO), General Electric Co. (GE), Dow Jones & Company Inc. (DJ), News Corp. (NWS), Vivendi (VIVEF.PK)

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Comments

[Lisa]

823,000 users actually seems quite successful given how recently they launched the website.

Anyone know how many unique users Google Finance gets?