Business media get ready to grab eyeballs

Business and financial information publisher Dow Jones & Co says it has the patience to build its audience in China but it is not expected to maintain its online Chinese content free of charge forever.

China is undergoing a transition from printed to digital media as the number of online and mobile users soars rapidly, presenting an unprecedented opportunity to overseas media giants.

Dow Jones' flagship product in China is the Chinese edition of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Online. Visitor numbers of the Chinese website are growing "quite dramatically". "We generate enough advertising revenue to cover the costs," Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones said in an interview with China Daily in Hainan province during a recent forum.

A foreign newspaper company has to find a Chinese partner in order to be issued with a license to print hard copies on the Chinese mainland. However, overseas financial media can publish online and through the other platforms without worrying about losing control of content.

The number of China's online users rose to 457 million in 2010, up 19 percent year-on-year, and the number of users surfing by mobile phone jumped to 303 million in 2010, according to the latest figures from the China Internet Network Information Center.

The WSJ Chinese website is facing fierce competition from its two international rivals, the Chinese websites of Reuters and the Financial Times (FT). All three mainly focus on business and financial news, analysis and comment.

The Wall Street Journal's Chinese website had 3.5 million visitors in March, up 68 percent from the previous month, said the company.

Reuters has more than 3 million unique visitors a month for its Chinese website.

The FT said it doesn't break down the number of monthly Web visitors, but its Chinese website now has more than 1.5 million registered users.

Thomson says China will develop an even greater appetite for business and financial information and the audience of the WSJ Chinese website could eventually rise to about 50 million.

"There's no doubt there's an increasing audience when you think about the size of China's economy and how it is growing. Chinese companies and individuals are making investment decisions and they want to be informed," Thomson says.

"China today is a small portion for our total advertising, but we have a very ambitious target for that. Currently we have millions (in advertising revenue in China) but we'd like to have billions," says Thomson, who is also the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Although advertising helps the company break even, the Journal is thinking about charging for its Chinese news portal in the future.

"In the long term, we have plans to charge for that. Our main one is not free," he says, referring to the WSJ's international website, without providing a time frame for the Chinese site to start charging.

The prospects for some printed media in the United States are bleak. Many companies suffered a sharp drop in advertising revenue during the financial crisis and some have had to go exclusively online and cut the number of journalists.

"Not us. We make money," Thomson says.

In the nine months after June 2010, Dow Jones' total revenue increased 5 percent, the company reported.

Digitalization and globalization remain two powerful trends in the world, which means both opportunities and challenges for global financial media, Thomson says.

Traditional media companies are trying hard to transfer to a digital base and build multiple platforms. The Wall Street Journal's Chinese website launched an application for the iPhone, the FT Chinese website launched an iPad application in October 2010 and the Reuters Chinese website has just launched an application for the Blackberry mobile phone.

"I think it's a really interesting period because we have a battle between the world of search and the world of apps," Thomson said.

In the US there is tough competition between Google and Apple. The same battle is also taking place in different ways in other places, including China.

"I think there's room for both. Difficulties for content creators lie in getting fair return. Some devices will take away some revenue. There must be enough revenue for media to create high quality content," Thomson says.