How Will a Free WSJ Online Affect Other Financial Sites?

Wall Street Journal Online, wsj.com, reported yesterday morning that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (NWS) are planning to make The Wall Street Journal's web site, wsj.com, free in an effort to attract up to 10 or 15 million readers instead of the current million paid subscribers.

This, Murdoch says, will sharply increase advertising revenues for the web site. Whether www.barrons.com also will go free is still unknown.

NWS was up 53 cents, or 2.48%, to $21.87 at noon EST. It's 52-week high was $25.78 and its low was $19.68.

What will this do to ad revenues for Yahoo.com (YHOO), MSN.com (MSFT), Google.com (GOOG) and Morningstar.com (MORN)?

It will probably expand the market, but NWS and wsj.com undoubtedly will take advertising and readership market share not only from those prominent financial sites but also from washingtonpost.com (WPO), NYtimes.com (NYT) and Gannett's (GCI) usatoday.com.

In the past, Murdoch has talked about making some parts of wsj.com paid while the news site is free. The site has great data and company information resources that could remain paid. But the site would need improved charting and technical analysis tools.

Obviously, a free wsj.com combined with Marketwatch.com and the still feeble Fox Business Network would be even more of a market-moving financial news power house and advertising magnet than those entities are today.

Comments

[Frank Li:]

Barron's started giving away it articles for free with a time delay a few months ago. Look at the impact on its traffic:

siteanalytics.compete....

2007 Nov 14 06:38 AM