Morning Must-Read: Rob Grimshaw: The Financial Times Adapts to the Digital World

Rob Grimshaw: “Ultimately, it does come back to the content”: “We were always going to a niche site…

…on the web. Our traffic figures were always going to be a constraining factor…. When the advertising guy took over the business, which is me…. conscious of the fact that advertising wasn’t going… we needed an alternative… being much more bold on the subscription side… turning the dial on the meter model over toward subscription… to the point where many people were coming up to barriers, a lot of people went through, and more than that, they were happy to come through at price points that were far above what any of us had anticipated….

My strong belief is that the core of… a successful model on the web is unique, differentiated content… finance or business news or general news or local news. If you’ve got something that nobody else has, and there is a group of people who want that, then you have a business…. Now the scale of that business is an open question…. People will pay a lot for things they want…. Ultimately, it does come back to the content. It’s got to be good enough or unique enough for people to want to buy it, and unless those two things are true about it, then actually they won’t succeed either way. They won’t generate the audience they need for advertising, let alone sell a subscription…