VITAMEDIAS
An Exit Interview With WSJ.com's Neil Budde: Our sense from the beginning was that we have to build a good-enough product that people will pay for it. So when we switched to the Web, we still felt like it had a lot of value and we felt like a lot of the company's core assets were in this product. Recognizing the prevailing climate of the Internet, we kept it at a very modest price, $49 a year [or $29 for print Journal subscribers]. We wanted a core loyal user base, not users who come once a month or so.
We also kept the price low because we wanted to build a mass of subscribers. What we really wanted to do was have both subscriptions and advertising, so we needed to get to a certain size and scale in order to have an attractive advertising vehicle.