Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
Who: Marjorie Scardino, Pearson’s CEO, led The Financial Times’ profitable year and tech-savvy strategy.
What: Scardino built a growth strategy around digital innovations, spearheaded by ft.com, The Financial Times’ online journal. The Financial Times’ strategy included expanding segments of the print version that were enormously popular, and adding interactive tools and comprehensive archives of information that was in high-demand by readers.
The Financial Times also launched a user-friendly, highly engaging iPad app which won an award for design from Apple. The Financial Times used its online presence to increase brand awareness of the company’s print products, as well as to drive clicks to advertisers.
How: The Financial Times digital subscribers rose by 70 percent in 2010. The Financial Times has a combined print and online average daily readership of 1.9 million people worldwide and the newspaper has a daily circulation of 390,121. Pearson helped drive the Financial Time’s rise by advancing a global strategy which co-branded educational and information resources in other countries with the Financial Times moniker as well as promoting a tiered system of online-article access, one free, one paid. Even The New York Times referenced the Financial Times as an inspiration for eventual online structuring.
Why: “It has always been an issue that we couldn’t have millions of printing plants around the world,” Scardino told The Guardian. “The presence of all these tablets has been very important to the FT. Not only has it given a good medium, congenial to our readers, but it will proliferate, it is a global opportunity for us.”
Learn more about the Financial Time’s 2011 outlook here.
More in Media
In graphic detail: Middle-tier creators are fueling the next phase of the creator economy
Facts and figures behind the growing middle tier of creators who make less than macro creators, but convert more.
How medical creator Nick Norwitz grew his Substack paid subscribers from 900 to 5,200 within 8 months
Creator Playbook: Unpacking the strategy behind medical YouTuber Nick Norwitz turning to Substack to significantly grow his brand.
Media Briefing: In the AI era, subscribers are the real prize — and the Telegraph proves it
In an era where AI is eroding referral traffic and third-party distribution, a subscriber who pays directly has become the most valuable reader a publisher can own. Springer just bought over a million of them.