Murdoch: WSJ iPad App Has 64,000 Active Users—And We Keep The Money
And We Keep The Money — It's not even a rounding error but one of the numbers Rupert Murdoch seemed to really enjoy tossing out during the News Corp earnings call: more than 64,000 active users for the Wall Street Journal iPad app after its first month.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 64,000-user figure lands mid-campaign for Murdoch: News Corp had already unveiled its [[a:none|Project Alesia]] paywall initiative in December 2009, floated blocking Google from indexing its sites, and joined Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and Time Inc. in an equity-backed digital publishing venture claiming access to a 144-million-plus audience. The WSJ iPad app is the first hard datapoint from that strategy — small in absolute terms, but Murdoch used the earnings call to stress the part that matters to publishers: subscriptions sold through the app keep their full revenue inside News Corp rather than being shared with a platform owner.
MediaMemo picked the story up the same day, framing it around formal subscription plans said to be about a month away — meaning this month-one number is the baseline against which the paid product will be judged.
First-order effects
- News Corp books the WSJ iPad app's subscription revenue directly, establishing that tablet distribution need not route through a revenue-sharing app-store transaction.
- With formal subscription plans reportedly a month away, the 64,000 free-or-promotional active users become the conversion base News Corp will point to when pricing is announced.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers weighing Apple's default in-app purchase economics now have a named counterexample: a major daily claiming it keeps 100% of iPad subscription money, which strengthens the hand of the five-publisher venture formed in December 2009.
- Apple faces pressure to clarify its terms for subscription apps, since the publisher most associated with charging for content online is publicly signaling it intends to own the billing relationship.
Third-order effects
- If the keep-the-revenue model holds, tablet-era publishing consolidates around two structures — platforms that take a cut of subscriptions and publishers that bill customers directly — making ownership of the customer relationship, not the app itself, the contested asset.
- A repeatable per-device subscriber metric like this one gives news executives a new yardstick for judging whether dedicated tablet products justify standalone editorial investment.
The trend: Paid-content publishers are using early tablet apps to assert direct billing relationships and retain full subscription revenue, testing how much leverage they hold over app-platform owners.