Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The release of the of the traffic statistics for the Wall Street Journal websites, seems to speak a lot to what Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (NWS-A) will do with Dow Jones & Co. (DJ) once it's taken over.

With their press release calling the websites The WSJ Digital Network, it seems obvious to me they're presenting themselves to advertisers as a integrated whole. It's like they're revealing themselves as a platform or portal that can be advertised across on all its properties.

The traffic generated across all their web properties, including WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsD.com, drew almost 17.9 million unique visitors, and a huge 424.7 million page views for August 2007. It was a 40 percent increase over last year, the release said.

Traffic on the Wall Street Journal video section increased by a huge 70 percent.

Now concerning what this means. I think it may be alluding to the possiblity of the web properties being all offered free online. Usually if you send out a press release of this nature, you're communicating to advertisers or potential advertisers.

The growth of traffic to the sites may justify taking the Journal off the subscription model to an ad-supported model. The removal of the barrier could increase traffic tremendously, improving ad prospects. of course that story has been all over the web lately as a possibility.

Another possibility is how the New York Times (NYT) has gone off its subscription model. They removed all subscriptions to general viewing and archives back to 1987. If users want access to articles before then, they'll either have to pay for them individually or buy them in bundles of 10 articles.

So access to current and recent articles from the Wall Street Journal could be possible, along with the possibility of selling older archived articles, which probably would be used mostly be researchers from various professions.