One of the big questions facing Rupert Murdoch when he takes over the Wall
Street Journal is going to be what he wants to do with the Saturday version
of the paper. This is my back-of-the-envelope count of ads in each of the non-fluffy
sections of the WSJ over the past 5 days. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s close
enough.
To get these numbers, I just totted up the ads I could see in the news portions
of the WSJ – I excluded things like Personal Journal, Weekend Journal,
and Pursuits. I also excluded the house ad on the back page of the main section
of the Saturday WSJ.
The big numbers, like the Wednesday Marketplace section, were largely attributable
to job ads; in general, display advertising seems to be very weak indeed in
the WSJ. But the performance of the Saturday Journal is dreadful even by WSJ
standards. One front-page ad in the main section, and one tiny legal notice
buried in the bottom corner of page six of the Money & Investing section.
Is the Weekend Journal a failed experiment? Can the property ads in the fluffy
sections successfully subsidize the entire rest of the newspaper? And in general,
how can the WSJ make itself more attractive to display advertisers? It’ll be
interesting to see whether and how Murdoch addresses these questions.
| Main | Marketplace | M&I | Total | Ads per page | |
| Tue | 3.3 | 4.2 | 2.3 | 9.8 | 0.29 |
| 12 | 10 | 12 | 34 | ||
| Wed | 5.2 | 6.5 | 2.4 | 14.1 | 0.37 |
| 14 | 10 | 14 | 38 | ||
| Thu | 3.8 | 2.3 | 0.4 | 6.5 | 0.20 |
| 14 | 8 | 10 | 32 | ||
| Fri | 2.7 | 1.1 | 1.5 | 5.3 | 0.18 |
| 12 | 6 | 12 | 30 | ||
| Sat | 0.1 | N/A | 0.1 | 0.2 | 0.01 |
| 10 | N/A | 14 | 24 |