FT’s AI paywall drives conversions, identifies who will stay

The Financial Times is building an AI that doesn’t just know who will pay — it’s learning who will stay, reports Seb Joseph of Digiday.

Joseph writes, “Since the paywall launched in January, the Financial Times has seen conversion rates jump 290% and lifetime value rise between 7% and 10% among the audience segments exposed to the AI-driven system. The publisher isn’t sharing how many readers that actually covers, but internally, the results have been strong enough to turn the experiment into a focal point.

“‘We feel like the AI is doing a really good job,’ said Graham MacFadyen, consumer marketing director at Financial Times, at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe, in Lisbon, Portugal.

“Still, he was careful not to declare victory just yet.

“The AI paywall only applies to around 30 to 40% of the publisher’s audience — the readers who’ve explicitly consented to data tracking. That means the model could simply be dealing with readers who were more likely to subscribe anyway.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.