FT.com plans pay-per-article system for website
FT.com aims for one-click pay-per-article system by next summer, and reviews whether to offer any content free — The Financial Times is to introduce a full “pay-per-view” model for accessing online articles by next summer and is reviewing whether …
Context & Ripple Effects
FT.com's move lands one day after News International announced the Sunday Times site would serve as its paid-for testbed, putting Britain's two most internationally-read quality titles on the same path within 24 hours of each other. It also extends a debate that had been running through the trade press and commentary since at least July, when Daring Fireball took up the question of charging for access to news sites.
The confirmed plan is a full pay-per-article model with one-click payment targeted for summer 2010; the report that the paper is reviewing whether to keep any content free remains just that — a review, unconfirmed. If the FT does strip out free articles entirely, it would go further than a hybrid wall, making the decision the sharpest test yet of whether casual, search-driven readers will pay at all.
First-order effects
- FT.com readers who today sample articles outside the subscription would need a one-click payment per piece by next summer, and if the review ends free access altogether, search-arriving visitors hit a payment screen before reading a word.
- News International's paid Sunday Times experiment and the FT's pay-per-view plan now run in parallel, turning the 2009-10 UK publishing calendar into a live A/B test of charging models.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers still giving content away face a pricing question they can no longer defer: if the FT and the Sunday Times monetise casual traffic, advertisers gain two measurable premium audiences while free sites' reach claims weaken.
- Aggregators and search engines lose indexable inventory if the FT drops free content, cutting the referral value that currently subsidises open news sites.
Third-order effects
- A working one-click per-article system would give publishers a middle option between fully open and subscription-only, lowering the commitment barrier for occasional readers — the outcome the whole 2009 charging debate hinges on.
- If the FT and News International experiments hold paying readers, expect the industry to bifurcate into walled premium titles and scale-driven free ones, with advertising rates diverging accordingly.
The trend: British quality publishers are converging on charging for online news in 2009, with the FT betting that per-article micropayments can succeed where subscriptions alone have not.