»
Having hinted at a free Wall Street Journal site while he was still courting Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch said yesterday (Tuesday) that the idea of making the website of the company’s flagship paper a freebie is still a valid one.
“That looks like the way we’re going,” he said (via MediaPost) during an investor conference.
A free WSJ site might mean a loss of as much as $30 million and a circulation drop of perhaps 15,000. But, if the site remains strong, greater dollars would come via contextual search. Murchoch also said that the site could draw an audience perhaps 10 times higher than what it currently has. That audience would be the “most affluent, the most influential people in the world,” and advertisers would pay a premium to reach them.
The New York Times yesterday announced its plans to stop charging a subscription fee for its archives and columnists, leaving the Journal as the only major U.S. newspaper to charge for online access (according to the Journal itself).
The debate about whether to charge for online subscriptions comes as growth in online newspaper ad revenue is slowing: the rate of growth of online newspaper ads dropped from 33.2 percent during the second quarter of 2006 to 19.3 percent during Q207, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
Print ad revenue for most newspapers is seeing a much steeper decline, however, and industry-watchers have debated whether newspapers will be able to offset their print losses with internet gains. During the second quarter, 7 percent of the $11.3 billion total (print and online) newspaper ad revenues came from online.
Though off-air online and experiential advertising grew modestly as a part of the overall radio revenue pie, and election-related political ads increased in Q3, total radio ad revenues were down 9% to $4.97 billion for Q3 and down 10% for…
Glamour magazine is running its photo of Britney Spears not only on the cover of the U.S. edition, but on the covers in seven other countries, as well.
Britney will grace Russia, Sweden and Greece’s editions of Glamour, among others.…
Titan Worldwide has signed a five-year deal with the Delaware River Port Authority to manage out-of-home advertising for the Port Authority Transit corp.
The contract covers advertising on PATCO’s rail service and stations between Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, writes Mediaweek.…
Publicis has acquired full-service agency W&K Communications, continuing its Asia expansion that began several years ago.
W&K will be pulled under the umbrella of Publicis’s Burnett agency network, and will be renamed Leo Burnett Beijing Advertising, writes Adweek.
Other recent Publicis…
With only four weeks separating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, Cyber Monday One (December 1) and Cyber Monday Two (December 
may command a greater share of online sales than they have in years past - thus increasing the importance…
Top American non-luxury auto brands received higher ratings and less negative comments from online consumers than competing Japanese brands, according to an analysis of consumer opinions collected from automotive review websites by Biz360, MarketingCharts reports.
The research, which aggregated a year’s…
