By Jon Bernstein, 10 October 2001 11:45
NEWS Chris Graves, a senior executive at Dow Jones, owners of the Wall Street Journal, yesterday defended his company's decision to charge for online content and urged other web publishers to follow suit. Describing WSJ as "the poster child of subscription" Graves told his peers at the PPAi Interactive Publishing Conference in London that free content was a curiosity. "When you get a bill for BT you don't say: 'What's this? I never agreed to pay for this'," Graves said. "And you don't get a cable TV bill and say, 'Right, I'm going to ring Sky. This is a disgrace.'" The WSJ boasts 600,000 subscribers paying between $29 and $59 a year. "Why do they pay? Because we told them they had to," Graves said. In addition to the annual fee WSJ users can search the paper's archive at a cost of $2.95 per successful retrieval. According to Graves, 100,000 such requests are made each month. Picking up on his cable TV analogy, he called on publishers of high quality content to join forces to form what he called a "ring" of must-have content. Users would happily pay for a selection of internet channels on a monthly or yearly basis, he went on. "I would instantly join forces with FT.com if they charged. What you can't do is let them into the ring if their content is free."
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