How the Financial Times is putting audience at the heart of its strategy

Jon Slade, CEO, Financial Times

Jon’s talk started with a lot of very familiar notes: this shift away from pure reach metrics, a more sophisticated understanding of our relationships with subscribers. Nothing, in fact, that we haven’t been hearing for a while from conferences like this.

But then he said something that would have actually made me cheer, if I’d finished my first cup of coffee: “It all starts from the audience.”

Oh, what sweet words to hear. Not “it all starts from the story”, or “it’s all about the news.” It’s all about the audience.

This, my friends, is my song, and it’s becoming a chorus.

But what does that look like in practice? Dominic Ponsford pointed out that the FT has an unusually high number of younger readers. And that’s no accident.

“We have put a lot of time and effort into building our younger audiences,” said Slade.

How the FT woos younger audiences

He explained that he tries to speak at a school or university once a month. He talks to them about where they get their news, and what websites they trust. It’s clear from those conversations that they won’t default to coming to you – you have to give them a reason to head to a product.

There were numerous micro efforts around the company on attracting young audiences, so they brought them together, with a target of 350,000 recognised readers under 35. Not necessarily subscribers, but registered and identifiable individuals. They recognise that they won’t convert to subscribers immediately, and certainly not in this calendar year. And that was a mindset shift for them.

So the Future Audiences intuitive was born. There’s a range of projects, raging from work on social content to a Substack for Alphaville, which has grown really fast, and which converts really well. FT Schools make the FT free for anyone under 18 if the school registers for it.

Their aim is, as Slade, puts it, to build relationships “from schoolroom to the boardroom”.

“People are drawn to quality journalism because they trust it,” said Slade. “Usually, they start because someone in a position of authority told them they should trust it. But today young people are more looking horizontally for signals of trust, from social platforms.”

Surviving the AI age

The FT’s approach to Ai? Slade sums it up as “we think we can be both the data and the destination in the AI age”. But how?

“Invest in journalism, and focus on things that can’t be replicated in a chat window,” he said. Oh, he knows how to say things I’ll like.

On the data side, they want a big red button to pull the live feed from the AI companies if they misuse it, or fail to attribute — and licensing agreements give them to do that. Uncontrolled theft of the content is a different matter.

“So there’s defence – how do you stop them stealing content? We’ve built their tools to do that.”

Fighting content theft with tools and deals

A startling figure: In one eight-hour window their tools detected 1.23 million access request from one trial account, from a range of IP addresses and countries.

“That’s unlicensed crawling. That’s theft,” said Slade. “We need a regulatory regime to stop this happening”.

That’s the stick they want — but ether’s also a content carrot in play. “We want to develop marketplaces where the FT can be the destination as well as the data.”

And the AI companies voracious desire for content is the carrot. He points out that they require fresh data to keep their product current. And that means they need to provide a financial incentive to people to create that fresh content. They’ve already done many deals with AI companies, but they take a lot of time, and there are no standards in this space yet.

“There is a safe way to be a supplier, if we get the terms right,” he said.

“Everyone’s really good with change — until it’s them who needs to change”

Audience Q&A

Does FT Edit work?

It was originally aimed at a younger audience. What they found was that creating a single stand-alone app is really hard and expensive, and discoverability is tough. So, it’s now integrated it into the main app. It works well both as a downgrade product to keep existing subscribers, or as a starter product.

How are the FT’s one chatbot experiments going?

This is Ask FT, built on top of 25 years of FT journalism. You have to work really hard to make sure that the answers are accurate. You should introduce prompts to the audience — suggesting the starts of questions people should ask because they often don’t know where to start. But it’s working well.

Does social long form work for reader acquisition?

“I don’t tink I can give you a good answer to that. I don’t think it’s just an off-platform experience — homepage video is working well. The longer form? It’s an upper funnel development tool.”