Speech Summaries

L. Gordon Crovitz Senior Vice President, President, Electronic Publishing Dow Jones & Company

Monetizing The Content Experience

L. Gordon Crovitz, Senior Vice President; President, Electronic Publishing, Dow Jones & Company, talked about the chemistry of publishing and delivering information in ways consumers want. He spoke about how Dow Jones segments its customers in order to create an online customer experience and how this applied to the redesign of The Wall Street Journal site.

Dow Jones categorizes its customers, for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, into three key segments -- financial professionals, corporate executives, and the consumer market. From these three profiles, the company tries to determine what consumers value most and how the experience of its online content should look. This is achieved from customer responses in data and surveys. Dow Jones learned that consumers are different online and offline -- news information from The Wall Street Journal, for example, is used in a different way in the online medium. By having consumers pay for content, the company monetizes its content. Since the online and offline businesses are closely linked, the challenge is to find the best ways to integrate these two in a profitable way.

Lessons in marketing can be learned from the offline world and applied to the online. By focusing on the consumer experience and using interest-based targeting, Dow Jones decides how to design its sites. It believes that the key to these decisions is content and brand -- tailoring this information for multichannel customers makes the online customer experience.

Questions And Answers

Q: What was the key problem you were trying to figure out with your redesign? (Dow Jones recently spent $20 million for redesigning.

A: We knew from customer feedback that finding the desired content was a problem. There was great content on the site, but it was not easy to find. It was frustrating to know that our consumers were not getting the most out of our content -- navigation was the key problem.

Q: What were the key metrics used in the redesign?

A: We looked at factors like the number of visitors to the site, how many users revisited the site, and page views per visit. We learned that since the redesign, the number of pages viewed per visit has increased by at least 30%, so we believe the redesign paid off for our subscribers.

Q: Of the amount of money invested, what was the biggest technology investment?

A: The biggest investment was our replacement of our publishing platform from 1995. We developed a completely new platform as part of the redesign.