FT.com Drops Pay Wall For Casual Readers; Subs Remain For Others
By Robert Andrews - Sun 30 Sep 2007 04:33 PM PST
From our new site paidContent:UK: Change is coming in FT.com’s business model. The site will on Monday announce it will allow consumers to read articles or data up to 30 times a month for free, from mid-October. FT.com currently charges £98.99 a year ($110 in the US) or £8.25 a month ($9.20 to the US) for access to full material, teasing with access to many full or partial stories...With this model, FT.com is not going the whole hog. The aim is to open up FT.com content to be consumed and linked to by more casual readers while retaining the subscription wall for heavy users. Quoted on FT.com itself, the site’s publisher Ien Cheng: “The figure of 30 is not random. We have studied carefully how people come to the site. We have always believed that the journalism we produce is worth something to our core users. This new model allows us to keep to that principle while making sure that our material is also made freer to the web universe.” More here…
Posted in: Companies, FT.com, Media, Newspapers
