Another call illustrating the value, at least for now, of a recent acquisition. … During his prepared remarks for the 2Q05 earnings call, Dow Jones Chairman Peter Kann said of the 4-percent total increase in revenues, “revenue would have been down slightly excluding our recent acquisition of MarketWatch solely due to declines in advertising revenue in our Print Publishing segment.” CFO Rich Zannino followed by saying MarketWatch “exceeded expectations” in the first five months of ownership. He also noted that excluding MarketWatch, the Electronic Publishing group still would have increased by double digits.
A little more color on the Online Journal sub growth. In response to questions, Gordon Crovitz, EVP-electronic publishing, told analysts that most of the 8.8 percent year-to-year sub growth came from “core credit-card subscribers, that is people who subscribe to the online journal directly themselves, and we think a lot of that was spurred by last year’s open house.” The company is upping its marketing for the Online Journal and may hold another open house. Crovitz said the company continues to see very little evidence that print subs are switch to online. Crivitz said, “In all the time that we’ve been analyzing that question, we’ve never seen a large number of print subscribers switching one for the other. They really are quite different experiences. We are focused on encouraging more print subscribers to subscribe to the Online Journal and we are hoping that online subscribers will also subscribe to print.”
Some other numbers — daily unique visitors to the Online Journal were up 19 percent over 2Q04 year-over-year; including MarketWatch, the Dow Jones sites had 8.9 million uniques in June.
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