Financial Times chief executive, John Riding has said there are financial and moral obligations to making paywalls work.
The FT has seen a 79 per cent increase in its operating profit for the first half of 2010, despite the introduction of the meter-style paywall. It also saw total content revenues from print and online rise by 14 per cent.
After the revelation that News International's paywalls on the Times and Sunday Times have cost them two thirds of their online readership, Riding has said the FT system has revitalised the way they work.
"It soon became clear that it was working," he said. "The quality of our earnings improved. The subscriptions model is a more predictable guide to income, allowing for better planning and investment."
The paper's digital subscribers reached 149,047 at the end of June, up 27 per cent year on year and up 17,000 from January.
Without compromising privacy he said they have been able to use subscribers' information "to observe patterns of interest and trends." This, he said, allows for a greater degree of engagement with the readership.
His belief in the paywall approach to funding journalism has a moral dimension, as Henry Luce, a co-founder of Time magazine said last year, when he said he could not stomach the idea of papers and magazines relying solely on advertising revenue. Riding agrees that a publication's primary duty should be to readers rather than advertisers.
