Last year, Dow Jones reorganized to match its goal to move from am unhealthy reliance on print to what CEO Rich Zannino described again during Thursday’s earnings call as “a more diversified content-driven company.” (I didn’t get to listen to the call live but have been able to catch up thanks to the SeekingAlpha transcript.) Subjects covered included the acquisition from Reuters of the other half of Factiva and its effect on the company, the sale of six papers to finance that acquisition, the WSJ relaunch, Weekend Edition’s ad success, and the increasing contribution of online. Some highlights”
DJ Online: Zannino: “We exceeded our profit plan for Dow Jones Online, helped in large part by MarketWatch. ... We’re beating our original profit projections by nearly 30 percent in 2006.”
Consumer publishing: Zannino: “We’ve said in the past that $0.80 of every incremental ad dollar flows thru to the bottom line. In the fourth quarter at CMG, this ‘flow-thru’ was 176 percent.”
Journal 3.0: Gordon Crovitz, president, CMG: The project designed to optimize CMG’s journalism operations has already had some effect; DJ Newswire and MarketWatch have split “first headline” responsbility for certain categories; DJ Newswire is responsible for all disclosure news accross the company.
Online advertising: Crovitz: The new online Markets Data Center had 3 million page views in three weeks. “You can do the math on the value of that, given our CPM. So that’s been a nice boost to revenue and to unique visitors and to usage. I don’t think that is cannibalistic in any way of anything else that we were doing.” He said there have been rate increases in many online categories.  They’re focusing on premium sales.
MarketWatch: Zannino: “We’re very pleased with the performance of our January 2005 MarketWatch acquisition. As previously disclosed, we’ve fully integrated all of MarketWatch.com’s ad sales, marketing and other operating functions with our other online operations to form Dow Jones Online, and we’ve also re-assigned MarketWatch’s enterprise-facing licensing business to our Enterprise Media Group. This makes standalone analysis difficult, but using our best estimates, we beat our 2005 EBITDA projection by about $5 million. In 2006, you may recall we estimated EBITDA at $33 million; and we ended the year with $32 million. This performance was driven by MarketWatch.com, where online ad revenues in 2006 were up an estimated 24 percent. The shortfall to our 2006 EBITDA estimate came from MarketWatch Licensing, which had some struggles during the year, as we’ve noted on past calls.”
Related:
-- Earnings: DJ 4Q06: Online Ads Up 23 Percent; WSJ/Barron’s Online Subs, Revenue Up