Brexit drives digital subscriptions to FT

Jessica Davies of Digiday writes about the increase in subscriptions to the Financial Times due to the Great Britain vote to leave the European Union.

Davies writes, “The publisher dropped its paywall for all Brexit-related news for 24 hours on the eve of the vote last Thursday and naturally saw a traffic spike. It has experimented with dropping its paywall before — doing so on its 20th anniversary last year. Its motive this time around: to fulfil its journalistic duty of providing undecided voters access to both sides of the debate. Over the weekend, the FT’s Brexit poll tracker was its most-popular-ever piece of journalism, drawing nearly 4 million pageviews.

“But people did not simply pillage its content for free and then leave over the weekend. They bought subscriptions.

“In fact, the FT saw a 600 percent surge in digital subscriptions sales over the weekend (compared to the average weekend) since the Brexit vote news broke, which equated to ‘thousands’ of additional subscriptions sales.

“That rise in subscriptions was no accident, according to the FT’s chief commercial officer Jon Slade, but part of a tactical real-time marketing plan put in place as soon as the news hit.

“‘This was an FT moment, which comes along now and then. We saw it with the Greece crisis last year and elements of the China crisis, but on Friday morning at about 6:30 a.m., it felt like everything leading up until that point had just been practice,’ Slade told Digiday.”

Read more here.