Ignition, New York: FT consumer subscription revenues passes advertising revenue

The Financial Times now earns more from consumers through subscription revenue than advertising, delegates at the Ignition conference were told.  The business has passed 250,000 digital subscribers now alongside 350,000 newsstand subscribers.

Managing director of FT.com, Rob Grimshaw, said the recent decision to pull out of iTunes had in fact driven growth. “We have users across several devices so we wanted one login, one password. This didn’t fit with Apple’s business model and they wanted 30% of the revenue. And then there was the issue around not owning the customer data too.”

Since the web app was released in June, Grimshaw said traffic had increased by 50%. “The world outside the Apple apps store is the browser. This is familiar territory to publishers.”

Mobile now accounts for 30% of subscriber views and 20% of all views for the FT, but advertising on mobile is still very restricted. “The industry as a whole is not doing enough to sort this out. Either publishers have to hard code the ads, but then get no tracking data which is key to clients; or go for restricted formats with tracking,” said Grimshaw.