The Wall Street Journal has never been a cheap read, with a year’s subscription to the online or print edition’s costing over $100. But the WSJ’s mobile offerings, such as its iPhone app launched in April 2009, have always been free of charge.
The mobile WSJ content will be free no more, or at least it won’t be in a few months when the new subscription model takes effect. If you already have a subscription to the paper, you will have to pay $1 per week for that content. Nonsubscribers will be charged $2 per week.
As newspapers’ circulation rates plummet, it’s certainly a bold move to charge readers for digital content. Yet advertising, whether that be online or in mobile form, has yet to prove viable enough to support an entire news team.
At a Goldman Sachs event in New York, owner CEO Rupert Murdoch said the environment for advertising is “very much better” than three or four months ago, according to Reuters. He added that the company was mulling options such as subscriptions and pay-per-view for Hulu, the popular online video destination founded by News Corp and NBC Universal.
