Rupert has made up his mind : the online edition of the Wall Street Journal will remain a paid-for model – at least for now. Here is the figures : the million subscribers bring each year $60m to Dow Jones. To offset such a loss with advertising would require at least a twofold jump in audience (some analysts say much more). In addition, the WSJ.com could have lost on both ends since he is currently able to charge $60 CPT (cost per thousand) to its advertisers, twice the amount of the usual free-information website. Those math settled the issue. Mr. Murdoch is not ruling out increasing the annual fee to specialized areas of the WSJ.com. He has some margin to grow. Consider for instance the French business paper Les Echos that charges the equivalent if $540 a year its web only subscription and $780 if you combine with the paper, versus $65 for the WSJ.com.
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