Why the FT is making its paywall leakier

Jessica Davis of Digiday writes about why the Financial Times is making its online paywall leakier.

Davies writes, “The reason for the change: After years of success and steadily growing subscriptions, growth had started to slow around three years ago, according to B2C global managing director Jon Slade. This is largely because it had scaled back on how much content it was allowing outside the paywall.

“‘We have a strategy of reach and return,’ he said. ‘Paid trials optimize our return, and we’ve seen healthy growth in our subscriptions business there. But we also want to extend the reach of our journalism globally. Two-thirds of our subscribers are outside the U.K., and we think there is more potential to build that.’

“That’s why, rather than choosing a selection of articles that people could access for free, it started letting people who came across an FT article via Google search access three articles a day. One article a day if they came via Facebook or Twitter. Traffic from social platforms has since risen 80 percent, according to the publisher.

“In January, its social media traffic hit a record high of an estimated 327,000 monthly visits on desktop — up from 160,000 last March, according to SimilarWeb.”

Read more here.