FT plans PayPal option for online news

The Financial Times will introduce new payment options for reading stories on FT.com, its chief executive has said.

John Ridding told the FT’s Digital Media and Broadcasting Conference in central London on Tuesday that the FT would begin trialling PayPal, the Ebay-owned online payments system, for daily or weekly access to FT.com, which at present charges annual subscriptions, within the first half of the year. Micropayments for individual articles could follow.

”There has been far too much talking and not enough doing” about whether people will pay for news, said Mr Ridding. He said that signing up for new payment services must be a ”frictionless, seamless process” if publishers are to avoid ”subscription fatigue” from too many individual paywalls.

The FT is considering charging £2 for a day’s access to the site, matching the UK cover price of the daily newspaper.

Mr Ridding added that it was crucial for publishers to retain pricing power and information about their readers, even when their content is appearing on other platforms such as Apple’s iPad or Amazon’s Kindle.

Speaking at the same event, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman and publisher of the New York Times, explained that his newspaper’s plans to introduce a paywall in 2011 would add to, rather than replace, revenues from advertising.

”Online subscriptions will improve our ability to grow and in the long term help us create an even more vibrant digital business model,” he said. ”We are not looking at [micropayments] at the moment but this is a world of constant change.”

Mr Sulzberger did not rule out charging for an iPad application at the launch of Apple’s new tablet device, or even collaborating with rivals such as Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones.

”One thing we have to avoid is saying, ’No we are not going to do that,’” he said. ”If you aren’t occasionally failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.”

Asked why the New York Times would not introduce a paywall before 2011, he replied: ”You don’t get any prizes for getting it fast, you get prizes for getting it right. We wanted to engage our colleagues.”

Mr Sulzberger said that the system would primarily be aimed at the Times’s most loyal readers, rather than trying to convert people who came via search engines such as Google. But he did not join those in the news industry who blame Google for their woes. ”Denouncing Google is like denouncing oxygen,” he said.

Book publishers are also pondering how to remodel their businesses in the digital age. ”The definition of a book itself is up for grabs,” said John Makinson, chief executive of Penguin, which like the FT is owned by Pearson. ”We don’t understand what the consumer is prepared to pay for. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error.”

He added: ”I think the iPad represents the first real opportunity to create a paid [digital] model” for reference publishers such as Penguin’s Dorling Kindersley.