While newspapers are suffering in the paper world, there are a few success stories online. The Wall Street Journal might be the latest. But there might be some startling weakness underlying some positive numbers on the surface.
After WSJ.com held onto its online subscription-based foundation after murmurs that it would do away with subscriptions completely, there were questions about how well the site could thrive. It has made some of its content more available (most notably its opinion section, which is now completely free), and this seems to have driven its strong growth in traffic.
WSJ.com attracted 16.2 million unique users in June, reflecting a strong 94% year-over-year growth, according to Mediaweek. The Web site’s page views also jumped to 150 million in June, a 45% year-over-year increase.
However, as Michael Learmonth at Silicon Alley Insider notes, WSJ.com reported even stronger growth numbers in March: 15 million unique users (175% year-over-year growth), and 165 million page views (75% year-over-year growth).
This obviously shows weakening growth for the news site (and a drop in page views), something that may be lost when just glancing at the impressive numbers for June.
The bottom line seems to be that while WSJ.com is attracting more users, they are of the more superficial kind. They are likely drawn in from other sources, read the article that they were linked to, then leave. This is good for its unique user numbers, but may hide a slight weakness in engaging its users.
It’s still too early to make a judgment on WSJ.com’s decision to stick to its subscription-based guns, but so far so good. Just don’t bank on sunshine and rainbows for the rest of its existence. It is, after all, a newspaper.
Sources:
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i9fe73c185acad367a9578e364c7010e4
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/the-new-wsj-com-more-readers-who-are-less-interested
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