Building an international audience

Sean Callahan of BtoB Magazine profiles The Financial Times and its aim at increasing its global readership.

Callahan writes, “Andrew Sollinger, managing director-U.S. commercial operations at FT, is content with the brand’s reputation, but he wants to emphasize that its content is increasingly being read by U.S. executives. Last year, FT.com’s registered users in the U.S. increased 29% and subscribers jumped 31%.

“Sollinger noted that as Asia and Europe become more important to U.S. businesses, the information in the FT also increases in importance here.

“FT CEO John Ridding said that knowing its audience enables the newspaper to create content products its readers want and also helps marketers target their ads more precisely. In the end, the process creates a ‘virtuous circle,’ he said.

“Financial Times stays close to its readers in a number of ways. It has developed a metric it calls the Average Daily Global Audience, which measures how many people interact with the brand in print, online and on mobile devices. Between June and November of last year, its ADGA was 2.2 million.”

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.