Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

The Bancrofts from WSJ finally gave the green light for Murdoch’s acquisition of the Dow Jones Corp., which includes the Wall Street Journal. I am excited to see this deal go through, as I believe a big part of the deal was due to the WSJ.com property being underutilized by current management. As suggested in my previous posting on Murduch’s bid for Dow Jones, I expect the following changes to come to WSJ.com:

• Better monetization of archives: The Wall Street Journal has a wealth of historic financial news that is valuable to many. Paying per article for as little as $1 can boost revenues greatly. An algorithm to determine the demand of particular articles should be created in order to determine the optimal price of the particular article.
• Micropayments: As with the archives and the current articles, users should be able to purchase the single article they are interested in. Keep the subscription model (well, that needs improvements) but offer the reader the alternative to purchase the single article he/she is interested in.
• Flexible subscriptions: Users might just be interested in unlimited passes to news on Oil, or news on the Internet industry. By allowing flexible subscriptions you gain more ground in niche groups looking for specific topic information.
• Better SEO: OK, this might be a bit off… but if WSJ were to optimize their content for search engines, traffic could easily double. A clear example is Technorati’s SEO results.

Murduch is a genius deal maker.

More news at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118595206198884573.html?mod=special_coverage  (we need to SEO this baby)

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