How the Financial Times balances advertising with subscription models

In the latest episode, the Financial Times shared how it is adapting to its new owners, Nikkei Group, and what it’s meant for monetization strategies. In November 2015, the Financial Times announced that it had been bought from Pearson by Nikkei Group for a cool $1.3 billion. At the summit seven months later, Hiroko Hoshino, regional online director for the paper’s Asia sales and Sacha Bunatyan, global marketing director at the Financial Times, talked about how the newspaper’s monetization strategies have shifted since the purchase, including balancing advertising with subscription models.

“The kind of data that we get from subscription is much, much stronger than the data that you get else from programmatic or an ad network,” says Hoshino.

Want to hear more international summit highlights? Listen to other sessions from the Digiday Summit Japan below.

• John Marcom, svp of international strategy at Time Inc., discussed how the publishing behemoth — one of the largest in the world in terms of readers — builds loyal audiences at scale.
• Forbes’ open publishing platform was met with skepticism at its launch in 2010, but today it’s being used to develop audiences around the world. In this session, Forbes’ managing editor Alan Griffin talks about how the publisher is doing it.

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