Change is coming in FT.com’s business model. The site will on Monday announce it will allow consumers to read articles or data up to 30 times a month for free, from mid-October. FT.com currently charges £98.99 a year ($110 in the US) or £8.25 a month ($9.20 to the US) for access to full material, teasing with access to many full or partial stories. It had only been a matter of time before the Financial Times follows The New York Times (NYSE: NYT), which this month closed its TimesSelect premium product, and the Wall Street Journal, from which new owner Rupert Murdoch appears ready to drop the pay wall; the FT.com own article on the topic frames its decision in that context. FT.com has 101,000 paid online subscribers.

With this model, FT.com is not going the whole hog. The aim is to open up FT.com content to be consumed and linked to by more casual readers while retaining the subscription wall for heavy users. Quoted on FT.com itself, the site’s publisher Ien Cheng: “The figure of 30 is not random. We have studied carefully how people come to the site. We have always believed that the journalism we produce is worth something to our core users. This new model allows us to keep to that principle while making sure that our material is also made freer to the web universe.” And they clearly still believe there’s mileage in the subscription model; CEO John Ridding in the same article: “We believe many FT.com users, drawn by these changes and the quality of our journalism, will become regular and dedicated FT users and join the ranks of our existing subscribers.” The site will also get tweaks and additions including blogs, video interviews and marker data.

IHT: “To get caught between all this ‘free’ or ‘paid’ is too simplistic,” Cheng said. “We see this as a third way.” Cheng said ad revenues at FT.com was up about 40 percent in recent months, compared with a year earlier.

Guardian: Project Mockingbird - the code name for the FT.com’s new access model - is part of a raft of changes to the site that include a redesign, a new markets page, more blogs and more video. Based in the subscription numbers, the current subscription revenues are between £7 million and £9 million per annum.

Rafat adds: I hope when they mean a redesign, they really mean changing everything, right down to the CMS and hosting. FT.com has hobbled along with a horribly-done site for years now, with cosmetic changes a few years ago. The site has always been slow, and used to have interminably long URLs, which were improved couple of years ago. It is porbably the only major international newspaper site which looks out of 1999.

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