Jon Slade wrote the number down because he could not quite believe it. The Financial Times had only recently switched on an in-house tool to spot unauthorised access to FT.com, and in under eight hours it logged 1.23 million access requests from 681,000 unique IP addresses, every one traced back to a single trial account that costs £1 for a month. All were denied.
“That’s not human behaviour,” the FT’s Chief Executive told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference in London on 10 September. “That is unauthorised crawling of our website.”
Slade, interviewed on stage by Press Gazette Editor-in-Chief, Dominic Ponsford, had been booked to explain record revenue and profit and the FT
The subscription model was always a bet on control
When Slade joined the FT in 2002, print circulation and advertising supplied about 90% of revenue. Today 80% comes from digital sources, and about half of the total comes from digital subscriptions. Group revenue reached a record £540m in 2024, and operating profit rose 41% to £42.2m. “It’s going to look good again this year,” he said. Some 3.5 million people now pay for FT Group journalism in one format or another.
Search referrals are falling across the industry, and Slade conceded that Google’s AI Overviews “impact us to a degree, but the majority of our traffic to our site, the majority of the monetisation, comes from having a direct relationship with our readers”. That was the design.
“The whole point, really, of having a subscription business and putting the audience as your primary customer is that it puts control in your hands. So you’re less exposed to the things that are happening with third parties and changes in technology.”
Jon Slade, CEO of The Financial Times
The internal scoreboard follows from that: engagement, a composite of recency, frequency and volume, sits at the top, then “recognised users” who have handed over an email address, marketing permission and consent. “If you asked me how many page views I had last month, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me how many engaged subscribers we had, I wouldn’t tell you, but I know.”
The FT will sell to AI companies, provided it can leave
“We think we can be both the data and the destination in the AI world, and that those things can coexist,” Slade said. The destination half means spending on what a chat window cannot reproduce: data visualisation, video, the experience of the site and apps. The data half is the licensing: deals signed with OpenAI and Google that set terms of use, require the FT to be named as the source, and include an exit.
“If the data shows us that something’s wrong, it’s not working for us, we call it the big red button. We want to press that big red button and take ourselves out of any further live feed provision. We recognise that once the salt is in the soup, so to speak, it’s very difficult to remove that.”
The button has stayed unpressed; the deals are “so far, so good”. The option exists, he noted, only “because we’re doing it in a licence arrangement”. What the FT will not tolerate is “uncontrolled theft of our journalism”. Some of that is second-hand: other sites write up FT stories, fail to keep crawlers out, and what reaches the models is, in Slade’s phrase, a “third photocopy”.
The FT is not suing anyone. Its parent, Nikkei, has taken Perplexity to court in Tokyo alongside Asahi Shimbun. “We’ve chosen not to take that route,” Slade said. “We would rather take the route of presenting what we see as an opportunity for the person that’s accessing our website ... and try and structure the licence arrangement around that.”
Bespoke deals do not scale, even for the FT
Ponsford raised the fear of smaller publishers without the FT’s pull: that journalism becomes a “dark kitchen”, cooking for someone else to sell. “That’s not our plan,” Slade replied. His answer for everyone else is SPUR, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition the FT launched in February with the BBC, the Guardian, Sky News and the Telegraph. The FT’s own deals are his argument.
“Each one of them takes a long time because you’re starting from scratch. Every single part. There are no standards, no real agreement about telemetry, what data you’re going to get back, what the provision of transparency and attribution will be. Setting standards around that, both technical and business standards, I think just allows the market to function more easily.”
Jon Slade, CEO of The Financial Times
Will the buyers keep turning up? “If you’re going to go for a multi-trillion-dollar valuation in an IPO, you need to demonstrate that your customers are getting value from your product,” he said. If the data goes stale, “they’re going to trust it less. I think that’s a problem if you’re an AI developer.”
The under-35 target asks the FT to wait for its money
Press Gazette’s analysis of Ipsos iris data last month gave the FT the highest share of under-35 readers of any UK national newsbrand, at 27%. Slade said that tallies with the FT’s own figures. Behind it sits a cross-functional Future Audiences team and a target of 850,000 recognised readers under 35 by 2030, which he expects to hit early.
The adjustment was financial: the FT is “really, really good” at spending money to acquire subscribers, he said, on roughly a two-year payback. Here it had to “recognise that we’re not going to see that return back in this calendar year. So that was a bit of a cultural shift for us.”
The tactics include FT Explains video for social platforms, a free Alphaville Substack that is “pretty geeky” but growing “much faster than our traditional newsletters”, and FT Schools, free to under-18s whose school registers. Older readers tell Slade they started because a boss, a parent or a teacher told them to. “Those points of influence, of trust, have changed,” he said.
The FT can play both sides of the AI market because it has journalism that developers will pay for and engineers who can withhold it. Few publishers in the room have either. SPUR’s standards are meant to close that gap, and they are being drafted while the crawlers keep working. Slade supplied the caveat himself: once the salt is in the soup, it stays there.