FREE, not really something that would attribute to the staunch ink-dotted capitalist that is the journal; after all, Wall Street wasn't paved with broken dreams like its west coast counterpart, it was paved with retail, cheap labor, and escrow. Nonetheless, this week, the journal is free. Why, because like every other traditional publisher, circulation levels are dropping due to interest in online periodicals, blogging, and search. And like every other traditional publisher, they see that the future is online. In fact, it is anticipated that online advertising spend will grow exponentially over the next few years - that isn't new money, it's money that is being siphoned from traditional advertising channels; channels that made Dow, Jones, and Bergstresser very wealthy men - probably made the Journals target market of fifty something millionaires rich too.

But with the transition from print to online come new pains and business models which may or may not be cured or sustained respectively by making content available for free. In fact, a lot of publications have experimented with free online versions only to see traditional circulation bottom out and less than lackluster revenue from advertisement impressions. Why? Three reasons.

• First, that was then - like it or not, the Internet has just recently become adopted by the mass market; and business has just come online (forgive the pun) to using the medium as a legitimate marketing tool that demands significant advertising investments.
• Second, writers are expensive. Granted you can probably get some liberal arts major for pretty cheap, but generating real and compelling content costs money, and producing a daily 50+ pages that people actually want to read and search for - well, if everybody could do it, there would be no SEO businesses.
• Third, producing daily content from journalists is difficult to optimize and index. Sure, people can find it easily by visiting the domain, but unique visitors are more difficult to get - hence, there are SEO businesses.

Making the content available is a secondary pain to making the market aware of the content. This is the pain that the Journal is attempting to solve with their free trial, but the model still isn't sustainable. So what is the answer?

First of all, let me say right up front that I do not believe online will ever replace print - in fact, the last tree standing will probably be cut down to write about how the last tree was cut down. The machinery is too bulky, but even as we evolve, no other medium will replace our historic sensual connection with the tangible written word.

I think that the answer comes in yesterday's news. If daily publications made today's and yesterday's news only available through subscription, but the rest of the historical articles free; maybe that would entice users to bridge the gap and subscribe. Once it became habit, the visitors would likely want more up-to-date news from the most popular newspapers in America. Best of all, it frees up 3 days for optimization, ranking, and indexing. After all, it is well known that Google does not cache subscription pages.

Teaser summaries do not work, there is too much competition for the search topic that users quickly navigate back to the SERP for complete articles, when researching any given topic. Teasers don't give real value to the advertisement impressions on the page, and worst of all, they don't compel the audience to view more pages, because the perception is that complete and relevant content isn't available anywhere on the site. Besides, its page views and time spent that demand higher advertising rates, not unique visitors.

Too many daily publications have teasers and haven't seen online subscriptions grow, but have seen them shrink along with their traditional circulation levels. And what of monthly publications that are being mugged by portals; the successful ones are producing unique online content for free and making historical articles free. I wonder what their loyalty levels are. Regardless, their online ad revenue is substantial, and they are definitely mitigating the receding level of magazine sales.

I'm very interested to see the results of the Wall Street Journal's experiment. If anything, it should act as a precursor to publishers creating some lateral solutions for waning circulation rates, increased competition, changing market behavior, and being forced to sustain revenues while entering a new publishing medium. I know that I am taking full advantage to read all those articles that had great headlines but I could never link to because of subscription bias. I might even think about subscribing to the Journal, if only in the hopes that I could one day personify their target market too. Maybe the Wall Street Journal should make that a guarantee, and then it would definitely be worth the monthly fee.


Rick Tobin
Search Engine Marketer
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing


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