Why the FT’s digital strategy is working

Ricardo Bilton of Digiday writes about the success behind the Financial Times’ digital strategy.

The business newspaper has 665,000 subscribers, two-thirds of whom are digital, generate more than half of its overall revenue. More than 35 percent of its overall revenue comes from digital subscriptions and advertising, a number The Financial Times expects to see hit 50 percent in the medium term.

Bilton writes, “That increase in content revenue doesn’t come at a cost to the advertising side. One of the more surprising outcomes of The Financial Times’s subscription-first approach is that it also helped boost its advertising business as well. By forcing readers to register, The Financial Times can collect data about who is reading its content, then sell that data to advertisers for targeting purposes. ‘That creates scarcity in a market that famously there is no scarcity,’ Grimshaw said.

“Core to its advertising proposition is Deep View, a data analytics tool that lets advertisers look beyond basic impression measurements to see who their campaigns reach and how Financial Times readers engage with their ads. All of this, coupled with The Financial Times’ programmatic efforts, helped its digital advertising business grow 7 percent last year.

“The FT’s unique readership is an attractive one for buyers. ‘Their audience is certainly the most appealing part of FT.com,’ said Linda Lydon, media director at AMP. ‘It’s an engaged, worldly audience with a high disposable income.’

“Lydon, however, did acknowledge the limited reach of FT.com, which makes it a poor match for campaigns that demand a wide net. ‘I’d work the FT for the audience and environment and potentially a programmatic partner to reach the audience elsewhere to provide additional scale,’ she said.”