Financial Times to allow 30 free stories a month
Posted by Bill Gaffney | October 2nd, 2007 |
The New York Times has dumped the albatross that earned them $10 million annually that was Time Select, and speculation continues that Rupert Murdoch will open up access to WSJ.com now that he’s at the helm of Dow Jones. The Financial Times looks as if it too is flirting with the notion of lifting the premium access curtain (even if it is just a peek) to allow readers 30 free stories per month, or a single story per day on average.
The point is that this model, even with 227,000 subscribers as NY Times boasted, is a remnant of an obsolete mindset.
With the ease of access to information and content, readers simply do not want to pay for generic content. That’s not to say that FT, WSJ and NYT content is generic, but the grouping of the content is. Newspapers continue to push the printing-press agenda online. They look at web servers as the new printing press outputting 300,000 copies of the same edition filled with general interest, rather than looking to expand the audience by a base-level offering of wire copy of lesser popular (yet remarkably marketable) articles.
Let’s look at the print product for a moment. With the introduction of Metro Boston and BostonNOW in an already busy newspaper landscape, print has been forced at the Boston Globe and Boston Herald to change their reporting. Wire and filler is so readily available that it has made for some truly compelling content in both of the major metros to curb the effect on their single-copy readership.
Online is and should be no different. So what’s working in the premium market? Consumer Reports, ESPN, Zagat, Playboy. To put it simply only the premier source of niche content nets the premium revenue.
Another than deserves mention is WSJ.com. There Murdoch is looking at the potential revenues that advertisers would be willing to pony up considering its niche readers, 938,000 of them, are already willing to spend money.
Newspapers have until now chosen between offering their content free, or charging on a subscription or “pay-per-view†basis. But Ien Cheng, publisher of FT.com, said the site would pioneer a new approach from mid-October. Articles and data will be free to users up to a total of 30 views a month. They will then be asked to subscribe for access to more material. [more]
FT.com isn’t the obvious success that WSJ.com is, but it does meet a targeted need with high quality content. FT will increase readership and revenues. At the end of the day, this hybrid approach simply reminds me of the old new England adage to “fish or cut bait.”
