Mr. Murdoch, tear down this wall.

Will Rupert Murdoch remove the subscription firewall in front of most of the stories on the Wall Street Journal’s site? At a Goldman Sachs conference last week, the mogul explained that "it's certainly on the front burner to decide what to do there." Last year wsj.com pulled in about $50 million in subscriptions.

No decision has been made but a free site "looks like the way we are going," Murdoch said. "Would you lose $50 million in revenue? I don't think so…But you'd lose some tens of millions to start with. Then, if the site is good, I think you'd get much more than that back just in textual search. And I think you'd get not one million paying customers, but, around the world, you'd get 10 to 15 million regular daily hits on it, and that would be the most affluent, the most influential people in the world...And I think that could grow."

Just last week The New York Times dropped its TimesSelect subscription service for some of its online content. The feature produced less revenue than wsj.com, pulling in about $10 million annually, although The Times said that number met its expectations.














“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com. According to an article in the paper, “These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.” Get the story from Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN. (Graphic courtesy of wsj.com.)