What we had postulated happened. Dow Jones, the owner of The
Wall Street Journal and wsj.com has purchased marketwatch.com for about $500 million (interestingly both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had articles on this deal in their respective editions today and reported purchase prices ranging from $478 million to north of $500 million). Regardless, what I had been predicting for several years has happened --- Dow Jones has come to realize that the pure subscription model was a failure. Now it has cost them over $500 million to obtain what they could have had for free if they had not embarked on the paid model in 1999.

Even with this acquisition, Dow Jones is still way behind Yahoo finance and some other financial Web sites in terms of market share and Web readers. And to think, Dow Jones could have owned the number one position quite readily if they had kept an open site at the turn of the century.

Now it will be interesting to watch how marketwatch and wsj.com are integrated. I see many ways to capitalize on this opportunity.

Will Dow Jones figure out the winning formula the second time around? It might be difficult for a company that has a "paid-subscription" culture to come up with a winning formula with an "open" site. This culture that lurks behind every decision at Dow Jones torpedoed them on the first go around. Will it torpedo them again?