FT to shake-up the way it charges for online content
The Financial Times (FT) is set to revamp the way it charges people to access its online content in a bid to spur subscriber numbers amid fragmenting traffic across mobile and social media channels.
The publisher will reportedly ditch the metered model it innovated almost eight years ago in favour of an approach already being used by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of trying to build a habit with a limit, whereby readers can access up to eight articles a month if they are registered and more if they become subscribers, the publisher is allowing total access for a month for a nominal fee. Certain stories or coverage of events may also be made free to non-payers, according to reports.
The FT is currently thrashing out the finer points of the model, which the Guardian reports that it will boost subscription numbers by between 11 per cent and 29 per cent.
The publisher’s drastic shift from its patented metered model reflects the impact mobile and social media now have on the way people consume content, particularly news. Consequently, newspaper chiefs have lamented the decline in importance of the homepage as more articles or accessed directly from shared lins. It has pushed many publications to revaluate their sites with the Guardian’s recent refresh done so to funnel more people to the homepage where they will hopefully go on to read more articles.
The FT will strive for a similar proposition later in the year when it relaunches its website that will mobile first.
Despite its worries of competition for readers swelling as sites like the Buzzfeed and Mashable continue to grow, the FT’s digital offering continues to soar. Digital subscribers for the newspaper jumped 21 per cent to 504,000, or around 70 per cent of its total readership of 720,000, in 2014.
To capitalise on the strong reader numbers, the publisher is pushing a more audience engagement-driven approach to monetising traffic. Frequency of visits and time spent on article pages are among the new metrics the FT is using to try and convince advertisers and agencies to spend more.