The Financial Times and Yahoo Finance have expanded their relationship, meaning a lot more FT content, currently protected by a subscription barrier, is going to be available free on Yahoo!. Now, if I had to guess, based on negotiating with Yahoo! at other times, the FT might be getting something like $8,000 to $10,000 a month for the feed -- archival access would still require an FT subscription (which, by the way, I happily pay for already). But, the underlying message here is that subscription barriers don't a profitable site make. If the recent expansion of the FT presence on MSNBC and Yahoo are an indication, the benefits to online presence are in syndication, not subscription models.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 6, 2003 07:10 AM | TrackBack