Now FT targets free users
Jinfo Blog

24th August 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Companies whose staff take individual advantage of their quota of free Financial Times stories are to be targeted following an agreement between the FT and internet user profiling service Trovus. According to paidContent UK (http://digbig.com/5bafdh), Trovus will monitor the Internet Protocol (IP) address of frequent readers to find out where they work, providing the FT with data telling its sales team who to target. It’s the latest phase in the FT’s campaign to move towards an entirely paid-for content model. Last April it launched Access Manager, which allows information managers to track usage of ft.com within their own organisations (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e18994); now the FT is starting to mop up individual users for itself. Earlier this year, the FT also took the unusual step of suing one of its own clients, Blackstone, for alleged multiple uses of its ft.com log-in (background at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16109), reaching an out-of-court settlement with the company at about the same time as it launched Access Manager. But this time it seems to be targeting apparently legitimate users who it would argue should actually be commercial subscribers. Trovus Revelation’s usage reports are impressive, showing the page at which the user in the identified organisation entered the site, how many pages they viewed and – if they came in via Google – the search terms they used (http://digbig.com/5bafdj). Trovus markets the system as a prospect targeting tool, but it looks as if the FT may be leveraging its capabilities to try to identify what it might regard as excessive free use.

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