FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw, regular spokesperson for the paid-for content model, has a real problem with the language used by critics of the paywall, he told Journalism.co.uk yesterday.
“It’s always put into pejorative terms.” he said, “It doesn’t happen to any other product: you don’t talk about restaurants giving people a bad user experience by giving them a bill at the end of it.
“It’s understood that something has been produced and it needs to be paid for; somehow with news content it has become a totally different argument,” he said.
It is almost regarded as a “sort of a criminal act to have the temerity to charge for some of our products,” Grimshaw added. “It’s something that we need to get away from.”
“We’re not a charity, we’re a company with shareholders: there’s nothing free about the information we produce – our editorial operation costs millions of pounds to run and we don’t see it’s odd to put a price on it. In fact, it’s probably the only way to run a reasonable business.”
Needless to say, he supports the NYT’s newly announced FT-style subscription model, scheduled for 2011: “Publishers need to get themselves out the hole and be a bit more bold and brassy,” he said.
Publishers shouldn’t, he added, be afraid to say their content has got a value. While he admitted the FT has a niche and affluent reader base for its subscriber model, he believes general news sites can do it as well.
“Our sense [is that] if other publishers do go for it, they will be able to build successful models.”
FT.com is not without its free content rivals, he said: “[W]e’re not short of competition – for every topic we cover on FT.com you can find a list of sites as long as your arm.”
“There are parallels between what we’re doing and what general news publishers will have to do as well. For me, the big thing is quality. It all comes back to quality. Whether it’s niche [or not] it’s got to be good”.
General news sites have the capability, brand and long heritage with which to build better quality sites, Grimshaw argued. They can be “far more compelling than one man blogging in a room,” he said.
“There are numerous ways that publishers can create sites which people are prepared to pay for because they are better than anything else that’s out there.
“I don’t see that the publishers are going to have trouble to get their users to pay for content.”
Grimshaw’s firm belief, as he has said before, is that newspapers cannot live by advertising alone.
Citing IAB figures from last year (available at this link), he said it was paid-for search that took “by far” the bulk of the money: around 62 per cent; with 19 per cent to classified; and only 18 per cent to online advertising spend.
“It seems everybody in the whole world is trying to float their business on that [advertising model]. It’s just not big enough for every one of those businesses (…) so something is going to have to give.
“Either publishers are going to find themselves in serious difficulties, or they’re going to have to come up with another way of making money.”
FT.com’s forthcoming content plans include a new Blackberry app, ‘one day pass’ subscriptions, and video for iPhone.
