Should Google buy Dow Jones?
As Andres Martinez points out in the LA Times today, Google has a market capitalisation of about $60 billion and rising, while Dow Jones has a market cap of about $2.7 billion and falling. (That red line in the chart above actually shows a drop of almost 20% in Dow Jones’s share price since the Google IPO; it only looks modest in relation to Google’s enormous gains.) So Google could certainly afford Dow Jones. It would also get an amazing source of world-class news and information – including the Dow Jones newswires, the Wall Street Journal, and half of Factiva. It could then leverage that information for growth, rather than revenue: I mean, of course, that it could and should bring the WSJ’s online presence out from behind its subscriber firewall, and make it free for everyone. WSJ.com would then see enormous growth in readership, in advertising revenues, and in general global influence. Using the wonderful metric of blog links per thousand paper subscribers, the WSJ gets just 0.40, c
