The Wall Street Journal Grew Digital Subscriptions 19%

The Wall Street Journal, one of several Dow Jones titles owned by News Corp., announced Thursday evening that its total subscription numbers grew 12% to 3.6 million over the last quarter, and its digital subscriptions grew 19% to 2.9 million. The news puts The Journal within striking distance of crossing the 3 million digital subscriptions marker, a milestone that has eluded the publisher, which reached 2 million digital subscriptions in Q3 2020, for the last six quarters. Top line The Journal has notched methodical growth in its digital circulation, though it has fallen behind competitors like The Times and Bloomberg Media. The front-running Times surpassed 10 million total subscriptions on Wednesday, while Bloomberg Media has notched 3.25 million subscribers since first implementing a paywall in May 2018. The Washington Post has experienced more severe headwinds, with its digital subscription numbers dropping from 3 million in January 2021 to 2.7 million that October, according to The Journal. The New York Times Surpasses 10 Million Subscribers, Shifts Focus to Bundles Publishers have faced challenges in retaining and growing their base of digital subscriptions, following a boom year in 2020 precipitated by an unprecedented news cycle. Some, like The Atlantic, which has 300,000 digital subscribers and 750,000 overall, have opted to focus more on increasing annual revenue per user than user growth. Between the lines News Corp., owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owns a number of titles in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. outside of its Dow Jones portfolio, including the New York Post, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun. Its Australian properties have benefitted from a deal that Murdoch negotiated in March 2021 in which Facebook and Google agreed to pay the media company an undisclosed sum for the use of their content. The social platforms have proposed similar deals to several U.S. publishers, but no deals have been reached. The arrangement has drawn mixed sentiments in the media world. Critics have levied that the private arrangements, brokered behind closed doors, favor large media companies and lack transparency. Advocates praise the arrangement as an innovative means for publishers to more effectively monetize the content they produce, which adds value to the social networks and search engines it appears on. In his top-line remarks, News Corp. chief executive Robert Thompson specifically praised the arrangement without offering financial details. “The landmark agreements with Big Tech continued to benefit our journalism and our bottom line,” Thompson told investors. “In addition to the substantial deals with Google and Facebook, we expanded our multiyear global agreement with Apple, which is expected to be an important source of subscriptions and of advertising revenue for our news sites around the world.” News Corp. did not respond to Adweek’s request for specifics regarding the financial impact of the deals. Bottom line News Corp. properties, including Dow Jones titles like The Wall Street Journal, experienced yet another lucrative quarter. Dow Jones netted $508 million in revenue, and News Corp. more broadly generated $2.7 billion. Though gradual, The Journal has seen consistent quarterly growth in its subscription product, and advertising revenues increased by $26 million, or 23%, in Q2. Revenue for Dow Jones overall increased $62 million, or 14%, in the quarter. The publisher, like virtually every title in the industry, experienced a drop in traffic in 2021, as news consumption fell across the board. The diversity and breadth of titles in the News Corp. portfolio no doubt insulated it to some degree from this downturn, but the increasing saturation of the digital subscriptions ecosystem poses an ongoing challenge to The Journal and its counterparts.

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The Wall Street Journal Grew Digital Subscriptions 19% to 2.9 Million

The publisher first crossed the 2 million milestone in Q3 2020

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