Digital goes first at the FT

Like them or not, newspaper paywalls continue better-than-expected performances, the latest good (for some of us) news coming from The New York Times Company and Pearson’s Financial Times.

The FT now says its digital subscribers make up more than half of its roughly 600,000 paid subscribers, having grown 31 percent from the 2011 quarter. It’s a potent symbolic milestone because it points toward the day, whenever that is, when newspapers become entirely digital products—ones for which people will pay. What the FT milestone shows is that “digital first” does not have to mean “free.” It’s not about the trees. And while it certainly helps to be a globally recognized brand, metro papers in the US have already demonstrated that they, too, benefit from collecting subscriptions with minimal sacrifices in traffic.