Posted by: Matt Shanahan
I did a little math last night to look at the gross revenue efficiency of an FT subscriber vs. a HuffPo reader. Currently, the FT has 149,000 individual subscribers. Using the US price of $4.25/week (lower rate than the UK rate), the 149k subscribers generate $32,929,000 per year (the actual number is likely higher). HuffPo is generating about 30M per year with an average of revenue of $1/reader/year.
Now which model is more efficienct?
The FT’s digital operations is on pace to generate about $200M in 2010. This comes from the 149k subscribers, 2.5M registered users, and 1,000 corporate subscriptions – a base of somewhere between 2.7 and 2.8M readers. In the HuffPo model, they need 200M readers or about 40% of the Facebook population to achieve the same number.
FT’s overall gross revenue is over 100 times better than the HuffPo model. This is the power of the metered model.
