• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, October 2, 2007

The Financial Times has beaten Rupert Murdoch to the punch: as the media mogul publicly ruminates about making content from The Wall Street Journal free online, on Monday the British competitor announced that its content will be effectively free online beginning in mid-October.

FT.com isn't actually opening the doors all the way: there's a limit of 30 free stories per month, and visitors are required to register at the site after viewing the first five. The paper said the new policy is designed to make the site more accessible to blogs and news aggregators--increasingly important sources of traffic for news sites. Around the same time, FT.com will also launch a number of new products, including more video journalism and new editorial features, columns and tools.

Readers who want to view more than 30 articles a month will have to buy a regular or premium subscription, which cost $202 and $407, respectively. Below this threshold, the free registration (required after viewing five articles) will also allow readers to sign up for free email alerts and other online news products from FT.com. The Financial Times' move to free content comes close on the heels of a similar decision at The New York Times, which axed its "TimesSelect" subscription firewall in mid-September.

Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, was quoted as saying: "Our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising." Schiller also said the paid sub setup didn't take into account traffic directed to the paper's site by search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Another blow came in August when Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of the popular book "Freakonomics," agreed to host a blog of the same name on the site--but demanded it not be placed behind the TimesSelect firewall.

Meanwhile, at a mid-September media business conference in New York, Rupert Murdoch said he would probably make content from newly acquired Dow Jones, including flagship The Wall Street Journal, available free online.

And in late September, Fitch Ratings issued a report endorsing free, ad-supported content as the most profitable approach for newspaper companies. The company said that online ad revenue will help big brand names weather the worst of the ongoing secular downturn. In the short term, it forecast increases in online readership for The New York Times and seemed to encourage a similar strategy at Dow Jones and the Financial Times.