VIDEO: FT.com's Rob Grimshaw on mobile and social media

With the successful launch of its HTML5 web app, the news site is now looking to corner the mobile space and find a way of making its 'exclusive' content social media-friendly. 

"We’ve been able to migrate the audience almost entirely over to the new HTML5 application and, together with it all of the commerce as well," Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com told Campaign in an interview during his visit to Hong Kong last week. 

The new app, with more than 2 million users, has also become a major sales channel for FT.com with 15 to 20 per cent of digital subscriptions each week being purchased via mobile and tablet devices. Slightly less successful though is the migration of advertising from an online to a mobile platform. 

"Given the scale of the mobile audience, there should be more revenue derived from advertising there; it's a problem faced by the whole industry," said Grimshaw. "The reason for the gap is all about technology. We don’t yet have the tools to give advertisers the kind of experience they want from mobile."

Ad servers, he continued, don't have the ability to deliver a full, rich media ad experience with tracking and targeting ability on mobile devices. "They can't cope with devices that aren't linked to the internet consistently."

FT.com is in the process of solving this problem in-house, said Grimshaw. "We're very close to getting it right and should be able to offer it to advertisers some time this year."

The other platform problem for FT.com is social media, a medium whose very nature runs counter to the exclusive content proposition FT.com is offering its subscribers. "Some publishers choose to leverage social media to chase huge audiences, but that's not what FT.com is about," he said. 

The problem with building large audiences online is monetising this asset. "At the FT we're making about 30 per cent of our revenues overall from digital activities and we've done it by emphasising quality over quantity. We focus on the quality of our content, audience and advertising," said Grimshaw. 

Advertisers on FT.com have access to an "enormous range of tools to target audiences with a sophistication enabled by the relationship with have with our subscribers and registered users," he said. 

So FT.com's approach to social media is not to pursue masses of free audiences but to ensure that its subscribers can choose to consume its content via the social media platform of their choice. "One out of every six minutes spent online today is on a social media site and if our subscribers have paid for our content they should be able to read it on Facebook, on Flipoard, on News.me or any other platform they choose," commented Grimshaw. 

To this end Grimshaw and his team are working on linking FT.com account with social media accounts in a manner that will allow the news site to authenticate subscribers looking to access it via these platforms. Keeping subscribers happy will in turn keep advertisers happy. 

"They feed off each other," he said, "You can't pull advertising without subscription and a 50-50 revenue model is the most sustainable balance going forward. The old print model of deriving most of your revenue from advertising has never been sustainable online and simply doesn't work."