Corporate customers – including newsrooms – who read the Financial Times through third-party electronic databases will have to buy a content licence directly from the FT from April.
The shift in strategy means that B2B customers who have 10 or more licences to read the FT through paid-for databases like Lexis-Nexis or Factiva will have to pay for content.
Since the new content licensing scheme was revealed in October, the FT has sold licences to 50 large corporate customers, and is in talks with a further 50.
Caspar de Bono, managing director of the FT’s B2B division, said the paper was moving away from the existing licensing arrangements ‘because we feel it doesn’t represent the true value of our content”.
He added: ‘Effectively it implies that 20,000 sources are of equal value. And we don’t agree.
‘There isn’t a customer who values all 20,000 sources equally. Customers will see different sources within that content set as having different levels of value.
‘If a corporate customer wants unlimited access to FT content, we would invite them to subscribe to a direct licence with us.”
The content licence costs £199 per user per year, and includes full access to FT.com under the part-free, part-subscription model introduced on the website last year.
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