Rupert Murdoch, newly-minted owner of The Wall Street Journal, had signaled his intention to make the newspaper’s website a free service. Instead, Murdoch will retain both paid and non-paid areas with enhancements to each during 2008. The newspaper hopes to upsell free traffic into paid online subs.

Online-only sub prices are projected to increase from $20 to $119 per year sometime in March. Print subscribers currently pay $49 per year for full online access.

Wall Street Journal web stats:

• 1M subscribers, 10M monthly unique visitors, $60M subscription income
• December 2007 uniques doubled to 5.4M over the same month in 2006
• For comparison, Yahoo News attracted 35.4M uniques in December 2007

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