FT: People are willing to pay for excellent content

Joseph Lichterman of Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Renee Kaplan, the Financial Times‘ new head of audience engagement, about her job.

Here is an excerpt:

Lichterman: The FT has a paywall, and I’m curious how that affects the way you approach engagement. Does it limit the way you think about social, for instance?

Kaplan: The paywall is integral to our model as a business, and even our model as a brand. Fundamentally, we begin with the premise that people are willing to pay for excellent content.There are lots of ways to access our content. We have a couple of new developments in terms of expanding our reach. One is “first click free,” which allows people accessing our content from most social media platforms to be able to click through and read the story free. We have a new access model, which is a shift from the registration model where you could access a fixed number of stories for free. Essentially now it’s a paid trial, where for one dollar, pound, or euro per month, you get whatever you want. It’s very new, but we’re seeing that users are coming back more frequently.

We’re working with the paywall. We’re only as good and as valuable to our readers as our content is good and as our business model is good.

Read more here.