Funneling Free to Paid

WSJ.com's McLeod talks content models and audience in AD Show Keynote.

By Bill Mickey
Tuesday, June 9, 2009

CHICAGO—Gordon McLeod, president of Wall Street Journal's Digital Network, opened day two of the Audience Development Show today with a keynote highlighting the keys to WSJ.com's hybrid free/paid content platform.

McLeod [pictured] noted that the Network has been furiously launching an array of new products to maintain and grow user interaction and additional traffic, all while keeping the Journal brand the flagship.

He also revealed that the only teams that are separated according to brand are the edit teams. The business side is primarily centralized. "Historically, we had separate teams for sales and technology. Clearly, that was a luxury for a different time," he said. "We've gone internally to a network model in terms of how we run the business. The only thing that's stayed separate is the editorial function. We spend a lot of time [editorially] keeping the products separate. Otherwise it's a big mush and our audience overlap gets too much."

The network, said McLeod, has tripled its traffic to about 40 million monthly uniques in the last three years.

Crucial has been the network's three-step path to paid subscriptions. Visitors typically start out as free content browsers, move into a registration phase to view more content and then eventually convert to fully-paid subscribers. "We've gone retro a bit," he says. "I'm a big registration fan. Registering users came up a lot in the 90s and early 2000s. The problem was it kept traffic way down. We've come back to it in a big way."

Successful registration conversion has depended on quick and easy reg forms—"light registration" he called it—customized product offerings, and additional benefits such as community functions that can only be used if you register.

Encouraging users to upsell to the premium level has depended on an aggressive development of premium-level products: The deep, investigative style journalism, early looks at new features and tools, and access to the mobile platform. "We're constantly coming back to them with things that are new and different to keep things interesting," said McLeod, who added that registered users were more likely to become a paid subscriber by a ratio of 6 to 1.

McLeod also revealed that his group's assumption that Blackberry use was ubiquitous among their audience was incorrect. "We thought the Blackberry was core to our audience, but we signed up more people on the iPhone in 7 days than we did in 7 months on the Blackberry. We've been completely blown away by that."

Also critical has been an effort to clearly identify what kinds of content the visitors are looking at. This has been a big departure for the Network, which purposely kept content levels vague. Now, visitors can tell at a glance what content is premium and what is not. "It's really helped make subscribers feel more comfortable because they're seeing that most of the site can't be accessed and it's the most valuable content. On the other hand, as we bring in more free users, it gives them a sense of the quality of the paid content and our upsells are easier."

Lastly, said McLeod, the print/online content bundle sale has been an important growth driver, primarily in getting print holdouts more comfortable with the online environment. "The pricing is competitive, but it's a great transition product. Down the road we think there will be fewer print subscribers and more digital, and this is a great way to get them to transition."