FT stands up To Apple with web app
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Much as it did when instituting paywalls before most other major news publishers took the leap, the Financial Times this month made a stand against Apple's App store by releasing a web-based app optimised for reading on tablets. In a Reuters article on 7 June, John Ridding, chief executive of the FT, told Reuters that the move was designed to "make it easy for customers to read the newspaper on any phone or computer through a single subscription".

But the bigger play is that having a robust web-based presentation means that FT circumvents the move by Apple, detailed in my 16 February 2011 post, to retain 30% of subscription revenues earned by publishers who sell iPad and iPhone apps to readers. Perhaps as important, it enables the FT to maintain direct contact with customers; the Apple model includes an opt-in approach whereby consumers must decide whether to give publishers their contact info, reinforcing Apple's power as the middleman to the transaction.

In an interview given to paidContent.org's Robert Andrews on 7 June, Pearson's Rob Grimshaw, The Financial Times’s online managing director, said that "app stores are not a panacea". He mentioned the number of apps in the Apple store, the difficulties in search and discovery, and limited marketing capability as hampering FT's efforts to reach more readers.

FT and other publishers are probably thanking their lucky stars that HTML5 is making it possible to emulate an app-like experience on a tablet browser, because ultimately it will be the user experience that makes subscribers bypass the convenience and ease of the app store. They really don't care who gets the revenue as long as the user experience works for them.

But is the FT's move making Apple want to play nicer with publishers? Perhaps.

Two days after the FT announcement, Apple quietly dropped  the rule that publishers had to charge no more for access to their content via the App store as it did in any other channel. According to an article in WIRED from 9 June, the rule was dropped without even having been officially instituted, and enables publishers to maintain differential pricing without being booted from the Apple App store.

If more publishers follow the FT's lead, it seems fair to wonder how the 30% revenue retention level and customer information data sharing rules will be affected.

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