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Rupe Shrugs, Says Free WSJ Site Likely

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.