FT licence strategy comes good

The Financial Times has released the new content licence that it announced last October. Since last month, only organisations with a direct deal with the paper can have access to its content.

So far, 280 organisations have entered into direct customer agreements. The FT has also made separate agreements with 12 news aggregators, which are licensed to provide unlimited access to FT content for organisations with a direct agreement.

LexisNexis, Factiva and Alacra are among the 12, and the FT is in talks with several other aggregators.

Caspar de Bono, B2B managing director at the FT, said he was pleased with the takeup of the licences: “Sales that come as a result of these new licences are equal to what we used to get under the direct model; from a financial point of view the transition is working. One of the reasons we made the change is we felt we weren’t getting fair value for our content.”

He added that the change had also been successful in allowing the paper to develop a better relationship with subscribers.

“We’ve learnt a lot about how different types of professional user use our content, both in terms of what they value in the content itself, and also the functionality that others bring with that content,” de Bono said.

The FT is offering a bridge agreement to let customers of some third party channels subscribe to an FT content licence and be exempt from paying FT fees until the renewal of the third-party contract or January 2009, whichever comes first.

Subscribers to FT content must purchase licences for a minimum of 10 seats, with prices starting at £199 per user. The unit price is lower for volume subscriptions. Organisations with fewer than 10 employees will need to take out individual subscriptions.