Wall Street Journal to Sell Advertising on Front Page

Posted on July 31, 2006

Jewel box is a good name for it since it is premium advertising space. L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Journal, told the Times, "The Wall Street Journal will provide the most valuable opportunity anywhere in any medium for advertisers who want to reach a large, affluent and influential audience."

The ads are new for the Journal but as the Times explains, many newspapers have started selling ads on the sacred front page.

But a host of problems have plagued the industry in recent years, forcing publishers to reconsider ways in which to raise money, including giving more prominence to advertisers by tapping into areas of the paper that were once considered sacred. This month, The New York Times began selling advertisements on the front of its business section; the paper had already been selling ads on the front of the Metro section on Sundays.

The Wall Street Journal already sells ads on the front of some individual sections, including Marketplace and Money & Investing, and last year began selling ads on the front pages of its overseas editions.

In Britain, consumers are more accustomed to finding advertising on front pages of papers like The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times (which is also distributed in the United States). USA Today, part of the Gannett Company, has run a strip ad along the bottom of its front page since 1999 and now most Gannett papers also run front-page ads.