Please explain FT's pricing model to me

Question

If you go to FT.com's products page, you will see their pricing, but it makes exactly zero sense to me.1. Their TRIAL subscription is $69/month (after the one month trial period). That amounts to $828 / year!!2. Their DIGITAL subscription is $40/month ($480/year) or $372/year as a single payment3. Their E-PAPER subscription, which is a digital replica of their printed version is $24.75/month ($297/year) after the trial period.Firstly, unless your info is literally worth gold (and lots of it), who in their right mind is paying over USD $800 per year for digital news??Secondly, how come an almost identical subscription costs nearly half of that?Thirdly, how come their third option, which offers very similar content, is significantly cheaper?This business model looks like it was concocted by a manic sales exec who'd done too much blow and molly.Could someone please explain to me if there is a method to the madness? (once again, over $800 a year for digital news). TIA.

neximo64 · Accepted Answer

There are 3 plans:Premium Digital: The trial one is for premium digital, which gives you access to the epaper, lex column and additional newsletters ontop of access to some of the stock data in the other sections.Standard Digital: no epaper, just the articles on the ft website, and no access to the newsletters or lex columns.Epaper on its own is a copy of the newspaperIt's a great deal tbh, worth every penny for the premium digital.

pyeri · Answer

This is a sign of digital media publication industry getting squeezed out of its financial resources due to oncoming recession in manufacturing and the global economy. When the total number of subscribers start dwindling, all they can do is pass that squeeze to the only existing subscribers who pay. Not sure if this will help them survive though. What we need is a team of macro economists and technocrats who know their stuff to fix this recession. We need the John Maynard Keynes of our times.