The hoary Financial Times is belatedly responding to Murdoch’s plans to make the Wall Street Journal’s copy free online.
Later this month, the FT will start making up to 30 pages available for free to non-subscribers — a retreat from its steep $180+ online charges, about twice the WSJ’s charges.
The two newspapers are virtually alone among major papers in their ability to get millions of customers to pay for their product — a fact directly correlated to their ability to instantly move markets.
The fact that even the FT and the Journal are going free speaks volumes about the growing clout of online advertising and the growing expectation among consumers that they deserve information for free.
I’ll be especially interested to see how all this impacts my former employer, Bloomberg, which still manages to charge $1,500-plus a month for the right to access its news and financial data stream.
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This post was written by Michael Stroud on October 3, 2007
