Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Money markets lose, FT gains

In the last month, where the current financial crisis has caused more than just a few tears in the dealing rooms across the world, one news provider has been smiling.... the Financial Times.

In a recent Reuters interview, FT's CEO John Ridding announced:
  1. Sales of the paper has just risen by 20% (Asia & Europe) and 30% (US) from August to September

  2. Registrations to FT.com have significantly increased (also boosted by a slight relaxing of their paid content model)

  3. Page views are double year-to-date, with a 300% increase on the week of 22 September
    (Goodness knows what they were last week then!)

However, market melt-downs don't happen that often and if you can't plan a profit then I guess you can't plan a financial crisis to benefit from either.... well, most of the city folks can't apparently.

But the FT does have further plans to improve its website, including: adding (more) video, providing more formats (Fancy using a Kindle anyone? No, I didn't think so!) and ignoring the taunts that it is cannibalising its print version.

However upbeat about the benefit of the recent crisis Mr Ridding is, he's also quite sobering in his parting thoughts:

“No one has necessarily nailed the business model in media, but we feel that we’ve got a pretty strong vision and operation.”

2 comments:

Unknown said...

FT is the best paper to read most days you do not want entertainment as it is business that runs the world not government in today's world.

Hayden Sutherland said...

I believe there's real value in buying the FT (not just to look intellectual on the train), just as there is in buying something such as The Economist.


I'll leave the subject about who actually runs the World today to a separate post. :-)