![\"Financial](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SHP_67531-1038x778.jpg\")
\n Financial Times managing director, consumer revenue Fiona Spooner speaking at the Future of Media Technology Conference on 11 September 2025. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette<\/p>\n
\n Financial Times managing director, consumer revenue Fiona Spooner speaking at the Future of Media Technology Conference on 11 September 2025. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette<\/p>\n
The Financial Times<\/a> has increased subscription conversion rates by almost 300% by personalising the paywall messaging and offers people see depending on their past activity and preferences.<\/p>\n However, when it comes to editorial content, the FT is focused on \u201ctailored experiences\u201d created by human editors rather than AI-personalised feeds.<\/p>\n Fiona Spooner, managing director of consumer revenue at the FT, said this was because \u201cyou don\u2019t want to lose the serendipity that comes with editorial influence\u201d.<\/p>\n Spooner was speaking on a panel about reader data at Press Gazette\u2019s Future of Media Technology Conference<\/a> in London on 11 September alongside leaders from Reach, The Independent and publisher software company Full Fat Things.<\/p>\n The FT reported 1.35 million digital subscribers in its latest financial results<\/a>, up from 1.28m in 2023.<\/p>\n Spooner addressed the experience of FT Edit, an app launched in 2022 that offers a curated eight FT articles a day<\/a> for a much lower price (\u00a34.99 per month) than a full subscription to the newsbrand (from \u00a3279 for the first year).<\/p>\n Spooner was asked whether the FT might use AI to choose the eight articles each user would most appreciate rather than eight chosen by the editorial team for all users.<\/p>\n She said common feedback from FT Edit users is both that \u201cthey love the serendipity of the Edit\u201d and \u201chow do I get a version for me?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo it\u2019s something we are looking at at the moment,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a big piece of work around our price and propositions, going back to what each audience needs and where our growth opportunities are, and we work really closely with editorial.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a great relationship we\u2019ve got with them, and they are absolutely open to using AI, not about content, but about making better customer experiences and providing value to our audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Where the FT does use personalise is in its AI<\/a>-powered paywall, which launched last year.<\/p>\n Spooner explained that with products like FT Edit, subscription-based newsletters and standard\/premium digital\/print bundles, the FT has \u201cmore products than sometimes people imagine\u201d.<\/p>\n She said it was therefore important to \u201cget the right product to the right person for the right price\u201d.<\/p>\n With the new technology, she said, \u201cwe\u2019ve been able to really make that much more personalised, because we know about demographic data, behavioural data, how many times they\u2019ve hit the paywall, where they are, whether or not they\u2019re a lapsed subscriber, ingesting all of that and being able to put the right product in front of people using AI and having different creatives depending on the news agenda as well. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s increased conversion by about 280%, and lifetime value by 7% so that\u2019s been a really big win for us, and now we\u2019re building that on the retention side too, so making sure, again, while people are thinking about maybe cancelling or postponing their subscription, that we\u2019re able to use that data to say, actually, have you signed up to this newsletter? Do you know that we\u2019ve also got the Edit? And tailoring the next best offer that we put in front of them, using the same capabilities and those tailored experiences to show that we understand who they are, what they need from us, what they value, and make it feel like we know them, and it\u2019s more personalised.\u201d<\/p>\n Full Fat Things managing director Stewart Robinson backed this approach for B2C publishers, saying that \u201cmaking the paywall more available to the person who\u2019s there, rather than just some sort of blanket rule and reacting to whether ad markets are doing well\u201d was working for his customers.<\/p>\n But overall he said he is \u201cmuch less worried than other people in the industry about radicalising by automatically showing people more of what you want, because you\u2019re only showing them your own content. It\u2019s very different from showing them social media content or Youtube content where it\u2019s been produced by the masses.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the best B2B publishers are \u201ctrying to build habits where they can slowly collect more real information actually inputted by customers, giving them more information about themselves, slowly, without having to collect it all up front\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n This means they are \u201cmoving upmarket more towards doing lead generation and highly specific products\u201d.<\/p>\n Personalisation \u2018heavily used\u2019 by Reach to turn fly-by users into loyal audiences<\/p>\n Mark Edwards, group digital director at Reach, said personalisation is a balance to be struck for the publisher of titles like the Mirror, Express, Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo.<\/p>\n He said they have \u201cdabbled\u201d in personalising what people see on homepages and landing pages but they \u201cdon\u2019t do too much in there at the moment\u201d.<\/p>\n Edwards said they are \u201cnot against it, and there\u2019s value there, but you have to strike that balance between showing users what they want, or what you think they want, and enabling that discovery. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019ve got a large breadth of journalism and things like news and stuff like that, you don\u2019t want to pigeonhole users into a specific area.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Reach does do a lot of personalising content recommendations<\/a> that appear on article pages to try and keep people on site for longer.<\/p>\n Edwards said: \u201cWe\u2019ve got lots of tools that we\u2019ve built in-house that use user data, contextual signals, to try and figure out what\u2019s the most likely article that that user will want to hit next.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s very important for us, because a lot of our traffic is search and social. We have fly-by users. So it\u2019s important to figure out how to turn those users into loyal, secure, whatever you want to call them, audiences. So personalisation is very heavily used on that front for us.\u201d<\/p>\n Personalised experiences \u2018driving The Independent\u2019s future\u2019<\/p>\n Andy Morley, chief revenue officer at The Independent, said \u201cunderstanding and delivering more personalised experiences\u201d is \u201cdefinitely how we\u2019re driving towards our future\u201d.<\/p>\n This is partly why The Independent launched its AI-powered Bulletin product this year, he said, which summarises Independent articles into bullet points.<\/p>\n [Read more: Revenue for Independent tops \u00a350m for first time since digital rebirth<\/a>]<\/p>\n Morley said The Independent publishes some \u201cpretty heavy\u201d but quality longer reads, and that they \u201cknew that there was an appetite for shorter reads, more punchy news reportage\u201d.<\/p>\n He described Bulletin as \u201ceffectively an Independent digest, which is written by our journalists, but effectively curated and subbed by AI\u201d and said it has \u201cactually generated jobs because it\u2019s creating so much more content for us and just giving us new audiences who\u2019ve got less time to spend on the content, but still want the information delivered by us\u201d.<\/a><\/p>\n Morley noted that The Independent has \u201cthree broad cohorts\u201d of users.<\/p>\n It has a \u201crelatively small subscription business\u201d but said those people are \u201chighly valuable\u201d.<\/p>\n![\"Stewart](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/DSC_92321-800x533.jpg\")
Stewart Robinson, managing director of Full Fat Things, speaking at the Future of Media Technology Conference on 11 September 2025. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette<\/p>\n![\"Reach](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/DSC_92051-800x533.jpg\")
Reach group digital director Mark Edwards speaking at the Future of Media Technology Conference on 11 September 2025. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SHP_66911-800x534.jpg\")
The Independent\u2019s chief revenue officer Andy Morley speaking at the Future of Media Technology Conference on 11 September 2025. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette<\/p>\n