LONDON, Oct. 1 — The Financial Times, preparing for a fierce battle with The Wall Street Journal over business readers and online advertising revenue, will give casual readers free access to its Web site this month, according to executives at The Financial Times.
The Web site of the London-based business newspaper, which currently charges for much of its content online, as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site.
The shift, part of what Mr. Ridding described as a broad overhaul of FT.comthat will be phased in over several months, comes as other newspapers are rethinking their efforts to charge users for online content. A surge in online ad spending over the last three years has persuaded many publishers that it is better to increase their Internet audience, in an effort to appeal to advertisers, than to try to squeeze meager revenue from online subscriptions.
The New York Times this month dropped a two-year-old program under which users had to pay for access to the work of New York Times columnists and its archives. The Wall Street Journal, which charges readers for most of its online content, is also considering opening its site to all Web users, according to statements by Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the News Corporation, which has agreed to buy The Journal’s owner, Dow Jones.
Ien Cheng, publisher of FT.com, said the paper had decided against a completely free Web site because it felt that loyal readers, many of whom work in the financial markets or hold high-paying management jobs, would be willing to pay for regular access. Meanwhile, by removing the restrictions for less frequent users, the site can benefit from increased inbound links from blogs, search engines and other drivers of Internet traffic, he said.
“To get caught between all this ‘free’ or ‘paid’ is too simplistic,” Mr. Cheng said. “We see this as a third way.”
The Financial Times, which started selling subscriptions to its Web site in 2002 and also publishes a Chinese version that is called FTChinese.com, was already working on the revamp when News Corporation made its $5 billion bid for Dow Jones, Ridding said. Mr. Murdoch has said he would invest in The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and international editions, potentially heating up the battle for business readers.
The Wall Street Journal has nearly 1 million paying customers of its Web site, far more than any other newspaper Web site. The New York Times had 227,000 paid viewers of TimesSelect, its subscription program, which it recently discontinued. The Financial Times, which is owned by the London-based media company Pearson, has 101,000 Web subscribers.
By restricting Web users, sites that charge for access may be undermining their ability to sell advertising, analysts have said. Online advertising, virtually nonexistent when The Wall Street Journal’s subscription model was set up in 1996, has soared in recent years.
Douglas Anmuth, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, has estimated that wsj.comwill draw $75 million in ad revenue this year, along with $65 million from subscriptions. But with a larger Web audience, nytimes.comwill bring in more in ad revenue alone, an estimated $175 million, he forecast in a recent note to investors.
Mr. Murdoch has indicated that dropping the wsj.com subscription fee, in an effort to attract more advertising, might be one of the first things News Corporation executives do upon completion of the Dow Jones acquisition, which is expected this year.
The revamped subscription model for FT.com is part of a broader overhaul of the Web site that will include a visual makeover next year, Mr. Ridding and Mr. Cheng said. In the meantime, there will be other enhancements, including additional blogs and more video interviews with corporate chief executives, they said.
Mr. Cheng said ad revenue at FT.com was up about 40 percent in recent months, compared with a year earlier. Unique visitors, a standard measure of Web traffic, are up about 70 percent year on year, to about 6.5 million unique users a month, he said. The site gets about 30 percent of its audience from Britain, 40 percent from the United States and 30 percent from Europe and Asia.
The Financial Times charges $110 in the United States and 120 euros in much of Europe for a one-year Web-only subscription. Ridding said prices would remain the same, even as the subscription model shifts. An online-only Wall Street Journal subscription is $79.
Mr. Ridding said the higher price is consistent with The Financial Times’s strategy of trying to appeal to high-end readers rather than a mass-market consumer audience. The Financial Times recently raised the price of its print edition, but still managed to post an increase in circulation, to about 427,000 copies worldwide, in August.
Most of its copies are sold in continental Europe, with some in Asia and the United States. Before revamping the subscription policy for the Web site, Mr. Cheng said, FT.com studied readers’ usage patterns. Many users came to the site only infrequently, while others returned many times a day.
Under the new system, once users click on five stories in a 30-day period, they will be asked to register with the site. Then, when they hit 30 articles, the site will ask them to subscribe. If they decline, their access will be restricted to the FT.com home pages, until the 30-day period ends.
