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This is Recode video, Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm talking to you from the Vox Media headquarters in New York City. It is snowing. It's probably not snowing when you listen to this, but we're taping this a little bit in advance. I'm here with John Ritting, CEO of the Financial Times. Welcome, John. Thank you, Peter. Good to be here. It's been a while since we talked. We're just going over the chronology. Yeah, it's been a couple of years and then a couple of years before then. And I think since we've been speaking, so much has been changing. It's... So much has changed. The nice thing about talking to you is your story is consistent, which is we have a subscription-based business, which for years was kind of a novelty in media. Right now, everyone wants subscription-based business. So we can talk about that. This is a free podcast where we talk about subscription-based businesses. That's kind of the pitch. It's actually not the pitch. Terribly boring podcasts. But there are a lot of folks who come in this building right now talking about how they're launching a subscription business. They're pivoting to a subscription business. You have done this for a very long time. Let's just go over some top line numbers. You guys started the subscription model, the online subscription model, when? So probably, yeah, the best part of a decade ago. Yeah. And in those days, it was very lonely in subscription land And prior to that, right, you've famously, you've got the, we call it salmon colored.

Yeah, salmon pick.

Agust financial publication, primarily aimed at a European audience and Americans who like to hang out

with Europeans.

And then there was a free online component.

Yeah, and I think we've always seen ourselves in the 30 years that I've been at the FT,

we've always seen ourselves as very global. It's been part of our DNA.

But we've made a very big shift from print to digital.

We still believe in print, but digital's been a real growth driver.

So you launched this paywall, it's a metered paywall, some version of that, 2007.

It's hard to remember back then, but there was still this idea that not only should stuff

be free on the internet, but it had to be free.

There was no way anyone would pay for this stuff.

Yeah, it was kind of like a religious doctrine, and I remember when we sort of launched the paywall

or the subscription model, because I don of launched the paywall, or the subscription

model, because I don't regard the pay wall as necessarily the best term, because it sounds

very rigid. We always had a degree of flexibility in our subscription model. But when we launched

this, I remember coming to the US and talking about this and doing a tour of the West Coast.

And it was very odd because, frankly, the reaction was pretty hostile. I mean, it was a sense that the West Coast. And it was very odd because frankly the reaction was

pretty hostile. I mean, there's a sense that you guys don't get it. And the line I remember

from the time was the internet wants to be free, which I always thought was kind of weird and a little

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