The FT's online and mobile success

Ian Burrell of The Independent in London writes Monday about how the success of the Financial Times in charging for online access is now being copied by other media.

Burrell writes, “Latest figures from the FT show it has 210,000 digital subscribers all paying a minimum of £250 for a year’s access to the title’s website and apps. ‘For a publication that circulates roughly 400,000 in print, that’s a big number, and we haven’t done that at knock-down prices, we have aggressively increased our prices for digital subscriptions over the past couple of years,’ Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com, says. When Grimshaw took up his post in 2007, an FT subscription cost just £99. Digital revenues grew by 56 per cent in 2010, helped by the growth of smartphones and tablets.

“That trend has just begun. ‘The mobile transformation could easily be larger in scale than the shift from print to desktop and it could happen at frightening pace,’ Grimshaw says. A recent survey of 2,500 FT registered users found that 45 per cent were accessing content via mobile devices. ‘The numbers were much bigger than any of us expected,’ he says. ‘You can only come to the conclusion that mobile will probably become the dominant channel.’

“Having previously focused on Apple products, the FT has shifted attention to Google’s Android. ‘Android has gone from zero to 30 per cent-plus penetration of the smartphone market in a couple of years,’ Grimshaw says. Within weeks the FT will make available its Honeycomb app for Android in time for the launch of a string of new tablet formats this year, starting with the Motorola Xoom this month.”

Read more here.