WSJ Botches Jupiter Paid Content Forecast

David Card | December 21, 2004, 09:13 PM

Thanks a lot, Carl. Well, at least the Journal spelled my name right. All publicity is good publicity, I guess. However, we haven't dramatically lowered our paid content forecasts. When we cut forecasts, we say so.

Quoting (better than mis-quoting, I suppose): Accompanying these dire forecasts were projections that revenue from selling Web content and services would surge. In 2000, Jupiter Research predicted that online paid content would grow to $5.7 billion by 2005. Since then the market-research firm has dramatically scaled back its forecast; now Jupiter says the market will be $3.1 billion by 2009.

"If you talked to media companies 18 months ago, paid content was the business topic du jour," says Jupiter analyst David Card. "At the same time, the online-ad business started to recover dramatically."

If the Journal had bothered to ask me about actual numbers, it would have seen that it was comparing apples to oranges. The puported US 2005 $5.7B figure includes music and games, as well as a lot of services we've since broken out with more granularity.

In fact, we're saying that paid content and services will be $5.5B in '05. Not far off from our projections of four years ago. Pure content, counting music & games, will be $3.7B. Carl mistakenly refers to what we call "general content" which subtracts services, music and games, and should hit $2.3B in '05 and $3.1B in '09. Heck, I even outlined this on the public site. That's the free site, (in contrast to the Journal's $79/year site).

Although some online media companies have wildly swung between betting on paid content and on advertising, JupiterRessearch has been pretty consistent in our srategic advice: most online media businesses will be 60+% advertising.