Fishburn Hedges

14.10.2011

I’m sorry that FT Tilt, the Financial Times’ premium emerging markets service, is to close. While there’s been plenty of praise for it, some of the comments on the blogosphere have been a bit mean.  Congratulations to Paul Murphy and Stacy-Marie Ishmael and their able journalist team such as Sid Verma and Tom Gara for having tried. Could it have worked?  Well, two contradictory things struck me today.

 A colleague here reminded us that “there’s paid subscription, and PAID subscription”.  Debtwire, another FT-owned premium service, recently posted a story on the outlook for a company we advise - a story containing a huge amount of detail and requiring a fair bit of journalist time, but a story that matters to about five or 10 debt investors and nobody else.  Yet Debtwire, although its numbers aren’t made public, seems to be thriving. So does Mergermarket, also FT-owned, although it feels closer to a data service than journalism.

I think the difficulty with Tilt was partly that its team was spread too thin.  The British may have run India with a handful of men, but eight journalists for the world’s emerging markets is just a tad lean.

The idea, as I understood it, was that locally-based reporters would be able to ‘kick the tyres’ of factories and economic activity at a very granular level. So subscribers would be the first to know about a story – whether it was a strike, a consumer trend, a supply chain hiccup, or a regulatory decision – with both analysis and raw fact.

Of course the idea was partly to compare and contrast markets. But since most of the stories were market specific, it might have made more sense to bite off just part of the world, producing a country or region specific product that could find a niche with a natural subscriber base willing and able to pay. I’m sure FT Tilt had great plans to scale up the operation with more staff and freelancers, creating a virtuous circle, but time no doubt conspired against it.  

Future for premium news

I’m not sure that this tells us much about the future for premium news, except that some will continue to thrive and some will fail.  There are plenty of successful premium B2B (more strictly, financial) media outlets, from IFR and Debtwire in debt markets to Platts or Argus in energy.  There’s nothing new about the need in business media to identify a niche and a market need and create a compelling and well-priced product to fill it.

Tilt’s weakness was probably its breadth - it must have been competing with specialist sell-side analyst research on emerging markets which, however tainted, is in some sense ‘free’ to much of Tilt’s financial target market.  For something like Tilt, the three main newswires, with their roughly 2-3,000 journalists worldwide, were also powerful competition.

I’m sure we’ll see more premium products like Tilt, both from the global business media giants and from smaller independents.  Since incumbents (think IFR) can become very powerful in established B2B media markets, the trick is to find the niche early and become indispensable - which probably means getting on with producing great content rather than market researching it to death.

One very specific challenge for such ‘super-premium’ products as Tilt is this.  The great bulk of communications people, either in agencies or in-house, won’t have the budget to subscribe.  So something may get read by a few bankers or asset managers, but won’t show up on the radar in corporate communications, in monitoring services and the like - and the bankers generally aren’t much good at letting on what new services they’re using.  Of course these things ultimately self-regulate, but premium services, especially start ups, that aren’t easily accessible to professional communications staff have the problem that they don’t find it so easy to build momentum through being championed and recommended.  

Posted by Andrew Marshall