Few company names or brands become part of everyday vocabulary, but Dow Jones is one that has.

For the past 100 years, if American equity markets moved, investors’ chatter centred around the gyrations of the Dow Jones industrial average (DJIA), the US benchmark index.

Yet while some of the company’s main brands — The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, the US weekly financial magazine — are steeped in American financial history, the firm itself has very modern anxieties. In common with all media publishing groups, Dow Jones has been forced to grapple with moving more content — such as financial data, news stories and archived information — online.

Until the 1980s, Dow Jones operated a near-monopoly on financial information and newswire services in America. With the rise of the internet, Dow Jones’s professional customers — bankers and analysts on Wall Street, private investors and other news groups — were able to access information from elsewhere, faster.

The market to sell financial data changed in other ways, too. The rise of Bloomberg increased competition; this year’s takeover of Reuters by Thompson Financial did so even further.

At the height of the internet boom, Dow Jones shares hit $77. Before News Corporation offered $60 a share in April, the stock was trading at below $40.

Even as the technology market slumped in 2000, the internet had begun to supplant traditional media, forcing newspaper circulation and advertising revenues to drop across the market. In response, Richard Zannino, the chief executive, launched a big restructuring of the company, trying to expand its digital business and cut costs.

He bought out Reuters, its partner in Factiva, a subscription-based information archive, for $160 million (£78.6 million). He reviewed where the company was spending money and cut jobs. The cost saving was even extended to narrowing the width of its newsprint to save around $18 million annually. He also tried to integrate The Wall Street Journal newspaper operations with its online counterpart, increased paid subscriptions to the site and sought to wean Dow Jones off its reliance on print advertising.

Mr Zannino had to cope with the unpleasant reality that as content shifts on to a digital platform, advertising revenue streams are smaller. Put bluntly, adverts on an internet page cost less than a traditional quarter-page in The Wall Street Journal.

According to Wendy Walker, a media analyst at Argus Capital, an independent research agency: “There is a real anxiety about smaller revenue streams from digital advertising.

“There is some sense that the different rates are beginning to converge, but no one really knows when and if they will actually match.

“To an extent, some of this underpinned the lacklustre performance of the Dow Jones share price before the bid.”

Analysts have attributed the group’s share-price performance in part to the shift towards digital, rather than the financial fundamentals of each of the group’s businesses.

Deutsche Bank is forecasting that Dow Jones, which reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in 2006 of $212 million, will record a rise in those earnings to $312.4 million this year and $404.6 million in 2008.

Dow Jones is split into three operations. The most lucrative is the enterprise unit, which controls Dow Jones indices, Dow Jones newswires, Factiva and Financial Information Services.

According to Dow Jones, more than 7,000 financial products are backed by the DJIA, representing $900 billion- worth of traded assets.

Last year, the business unit reported revenues of $290 million, up from $281 million the year before.

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