News Corp rethinks WSJ.com charging

by Tristan O'Carroll Media Week 15-Jan-08, 10:25

LONDON - News Corporation is rethinking plans to abolish subscription charges entirely for the Wall Street Journal's website.

In the months following News Corp’s August agreement to buy WSJ owner Dow Jones for $5.6bn (£2.7bn), Rupert Murdoch had outlined plans to fully lift the pay wall on the WSJ website.

Instead of having around one million paying subscribers, Murdoch wanted to up the site’s user base to between 10 million and 15 million by making it a free, ad-funded service.

But according to a senior News Corp source, the company, which completed its acquisition in December, now sees the merit of retaining charges for certain elements of the site with a new hybrid charging model.

Although no final decision has been taken, the source said that charges would be retained for valuable historical datasets and certain analyses.

Should News Corp decide to retain some charging, it would present a dilemma at UK rival the Financial Times, which introduced a new model for online content on its site on 1 October.

FT.com, which has 101,000 subscribers, now allows users to access 30 stories during each rolling monthly period for free, but then begins to levy charges.