MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Business newspapers on website for free competition

Pearson, the world's largest education publisher announced this week it was partially opening up free access to its Financial Times newspaper as it adopted a new online business model.

From mid-October, the ft.com Web site will allow free access to 30 stories per month before subscription charges apply. Pearson said the change would allow blogs, news aggregators and other Web sites to access its content and link to the site more freely. The site's financial video, columns and markets coverage is also being extended. The decision to open up ft.com follows trials in Italy and Spain, and marks the latest strategy initiative by news publishers trying to boost subscription and advertising revenues. "The new model is innovative and flexible and will broaden our reach," said Financial Times Chief Executive John Ridding. Last month, News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said he was interested in making the online Wall Street Journal free while the New York Times recently decided to drop its subscription service for online articles. The wsj.com currently charges an annual fee of US$99, but Murdoch has said making it free would help boost viewer-ship and revenue globally. Standard and premium subscription for ft.com is 201 and 404 US dollars respectively. The company's half-year results in August showed ft.com subscribers were up 12% on the year at 97,000. Pearson said on Monday this was now up to 101,000, which means revenues from its site spans 20.3 million to 38.6 million US dollars. This figure is relatively small when set against the group's 8.9 billion US dollars of revenue last year, a figure fuelled by Pearson's publishing activities within education. The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are rare examples of subscription models in a market where the vast majority of newspaper content is available for free on the Web. The Journal has around 983,000 paying users. London-based media analysts said Pearson's move was potentially a pre-emptive strike against the Journal. Analysts have expressed concern about the competitive threat Murdoch poses for the Financial Times following his 5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Co Inc, which publishes the Journal. In an interview published in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper last September 23 News Corp president Peter Chernin was quoted as saying the company would "crush" the Financial Times in the wake of the Dow acquisition. "It would be nice to think that ad revenue would kick up materially as traffic to a free ft.com increased, but if wsj.com and newyorktimes.com are also chasing the same audience this is not a given" said Deutsche's Mark Braley.