Bean Counter

Why Does WSJ.com Charge For Content?

WSJ.com was started in 1996, made possible in its current form by the development of Web Browsers. But for the 10 or 15 years prior to that, Dow Jones was selling WSJ content over telephone lines to customers with modems for a fee. I think the last fee was $25 per month for unlimited usage, but prior to that they charged by KB or by time, as did Compuserve, Prodigy and the early AOL. When WSJ.com was started, it was in some sense an upgrade to the News Retrieval product, and why stop charging for something when people already had proved they would pay. I think DJ's early ventures into electronic pubishing provided knowledge and research that led to the paid model, and a successful one, for its content. Kann's modesty aside, the decision to pay at DJ was an outgrowth of what had gone on before there, and not just a flip of the coin accident.