The Financial Times is saying it might charge around £2 a day to access FT.com and is to introduce Paypal. Micropayments are still being thought about as well.
Speaking at the FT’s Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference in London John Ridding today said FT.com would begin trialling Ebay’s PayPal online payments and mentioned the £2 a day charge. That’s a very interesting figure, of course. It is what the paper costs and so the FT is drawing a clear line between its print content and its online content in terms of value (although at the moment it is still pushing that £1 trial offer).
Rob Grimshaw, the managing director of FT.com had already said earlier this year that the Financial Times was to introduce day passes to give visitors 24-hour access to the site. It all ads to a growing success story. Pearson also reported this week also reported a 15% increase in FT.com digital subscribers to 126,000.
The FT quoted Ridding as also saying that signing up for any new payment services had to be a “frictionless, seamless process” in order to avoid “subscription fatigue” from paywalls.
Hence Paypal and why there is talk elsewhere of the web based iTunes store that has been linked to the New York Times website. Speaking in January Janet Robinson, president and chief executive of the New York Times Company, cited iTunes as paving “the way for users to pay for digital content”.
Coincidentally, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman and publisher of the New York Times was speaking at the same event as Ridding today. He said that online subscriptions would improve the ability of the New York Times to grow and in the long term help “create an even more vibrant digital business model”.
However, unlike the FT he said the New York Times was not looking at micropayments “at the moment” but stressed “this is a world of constant change”.
If the NY Times charges for the Apple iPad (Sulzberger didn’t apparently rule this out) when it launches on that platform and that uses the web based iTunes platform then micropayments could well be something that gets looked at down the line.
He also explained why the paper was waiting to 2011 to introduce its metered approach to charging.
“You don’t get any prizes for getting it fast, you get prizes for getting it right. We wanted to engage our colleagues”, he said.
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