Company Overview: FT.com

Deciding what to buy and how to deploy news for the enterprise continues to be a challenge for vendor portfolio managers. Choices range from free, do-it-yourself models (such as Google news) to the full array of premium content delivered through a proprietary platform (such as Factiva or LexisNexis). To help vendor portfolio managers better understand evolving news payment models, it is instructive to take a look at FT.com. The digital news business arm of the London-based Financial Times is known for its “metering” model, which allows readers some free page views before mandating a subscription to gain further access. Outsell believes that FT.com’s thinking and learning in other areas of the digital business bear attention as well. This report focuses on five key lessons from FT.com that are important for news publishers to watch and for vendor portfolio managers to understand as harbingers of evolving publishing models and their potential impact on enterprise news procurement and deployment.

The report contains:

- Highlights of FT.com, including what is working best for it and what makes it unique;
- Analysis of the competitive landscape for FT.com;
- Opportunities and threats facing FT.com;
- An FT.com at-a-glance table, including estimated revenue and details about its business model, web statistics, and key products;
- Imperatives for information managers who continue to shape news delivery for their organizations and rethink their own business models.