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WSJ To Continue Paid Subscriptions And Increase Free Offerings
by Allen Stern on January 24th, 2008
Emily Steel at the Wall Street Journal oddly enough is reporting on a decision made by WSJ Chairman Rupert Murdoch to keep a "significant portion" of the site behind a pay-wall.
Steel grabbed a quote from Murdoch at the World Economic Forum today, ""We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, Mr. Murdoch said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."
I support the decision to keep things behind a paywall where appropriate. There’s more than one model to monetize content. Check out our article on the new Digg-WSJ marriage.
There is no way that they could have increase their traffic enough to offset the subscription model the only issue that they have is finding out how to sell more subscriptions. All these companies that have paid memberships have people willing to pay for the content, they just aren’t selling it to them the way they want it.
Who wants monthly billing for mini-charges. Bundles, like the cable TV model, would work for paid memberships the way OnScribe is doing it.