Welcome to Market Revolution's blog



Thank you for visiting Market Revolution's blog.

We live and work in exciting times - revolutionary times. Technology continues to recast the media industry.

The extraordinary advance of affordable personal digital technology and the stellar rise of social networks are both distrupting and transforming the media market making this a unique moment to be involved in the convergence sectors we focus on.

This is also our place to ruminate and comment on the world as we see it, we hope you enjoy and please join in.





Monday 1 October 2007

FT.com pushing new subscription acquisition

Mediaguardian today carries the news that FT.com is to change the way it charges its web content, after a successful trial overseas. It's still offering a £99 a year subscription to see content hidden behind the "subscriber wall", but now also offering 5 free articles and then a "light" registration to see a further 30 articles a month.

Reading between the lines, it looks like the subscriber growth needed a kick-start, and a 2 stage process of subscriber acquisition through different access to content worked successfully abroad.

This comes 2 weeks after the NY Times dropped its subscription charges and moved to an advertising revenue model.

Will the FT abandon subscription in the future? They clearly state not - "(our) strategic belief is that our content is worth paying for, whatever the channel" "We are very confident that people are prepared to pay a reasonable price for FT journalism".

But with the Wall Street Journal in Rupert's hands, is this a pre-emptive reaction from FT.com before they wake up with tanks parked on the lawn? I'd suggest so - identify your premium audience by name right now, before the WSJ is properly woken up.

No comments: