• Paid Content, Wednesday, November 25, 2009 1:41 PM

On Tuesday, news broke that Dow Jones & Co. had agreed to sell its Online Financial Solutions business to Interactive Data Corporation. A day later, an SEC filing has revealed the price of the sale -- $13.5 -- which industry watchers see as shockingly low, and the best evidence yet that Dow Jones is under serious pressure from parent News Corp. to slim down.

Calling the selling price "a shocker," paidContent surmised that Dow Jones "really really wanted the unit off its hands."

To put the sale price of $13.5 million into perspective, Dow Jones said it expected OFS -- part of MarketWatch Licensing Services before Dow Jones acquired MarketWatch in 2005 -- to generate revenues of about $14 million this year, and to be profitable.

The OFS assets are just the latest in a string of divestitures for Dow Jones & Co., whose parent company News Corp. has not been immune to the economic downturn. It just sold its one-third interest in European stock-indexing business Stoxx for $300 million, and recently sold its online news syndication services unit Screaming Media to content management company YellowBrix for an undisclosed sum.

The OFS assets are used to develop and host Web-based solutions including news, market data, research and financial charting, along with portfolio management and alerting capabilities for some 200 financial institutions, investor services, and media Web portals.

Dow Jones says it plans to hold onto OFS's news business and enter into a non-exclusive redistribution agreement with Interactive Data to sell MarketWatch news to new and existing customers in the OFS market. That, according to paidContent publisher and editor Rafat Ali, looks less than likely.

"Since (Dow Jones) is divesting off non core assets with such gumption, maybe it is time they offload Marketwatch as well, since it increasingly is duplicative of what WSJ does," Ali tweeted on Tuesday. "And who would be a perfect buyer? CBS, which once held a stake in Marketwatch, and hasn't been able to burn the charts with its new-ish site Moneywatch site. Of course now that DJ has sold off some parts of the Marketwatch enterprise solutions for such a low price, expect the sale price of Marketwatch to be in double digit millions, at best, if it happens, nowhere near $520 million it got in 2004."

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