FT.com is moving away from a subscription only model in favour of a new, hybrid structure that allows people 30 views per month before its fees kick in.
More newspapers have accepted the need to abandon subscriptions and increase their web traffic, while hopefully making enough from increased ad revenue to cover the lost income from subscribers.
But FT.com has decided to take a slightly different approach – users can see 30 articles a month for free but will need to register after the first five articles.
This should mean that light users of the site will be able to access what they want, as well as allowing bloggers and news aggregation sites to link to the FT’s content.
The newspaper currently has around 100,000 subscribers, each paying around £99 per year to access the site's content.
The FT will hope the move gives it the best of both worlds - the website should benefit from increased traffic and links by opening up the site to non-subscribers, while heavy users of the site will still have an incentive to pay for a subscription.
If it works, the FT may have found a way to boost its traffic and income from online advertising, while still retaining its income from subscribers.
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Newspapers face up to online conundrum
Online ad spend overtakes newspapers
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
8:35PM on 18th June 2008
Interesting dynamic to the subscription model. According to <a href="http://www.bizak.com">Bizak.com</a> subscription models average $1.02 Earnings per Visitor (EPV). This is much better than most advertising models that range from a low of $0.06 EPV (Google Adsense) to $0.19 EPV (In House Advertising.) Even though subscription models tend to be more profitable than advertising models they still are only used by 8% of the startups listed on <a href="http://www.bizak.com">Bizak.com</a>. <a href="http://tomokeefe.com/2008/06/16/advertising-preferred-business-model-for-58-of-startups/">Advertising makes up 58% of online revenue models</a> with Adsense representing 21.5% and In House Advertising 25%.