FT CEO says ad visibility not improving

John Ridding, CEO of the Financial Times, speaks during a Reuters Media summit in London December 2, 2009.

LONDON (Reuters) - The Financial Times still has extremely low visibility on future advertising sales but is managing to stick to its ratecard despite widespread discounting in the industry, its chief executive told Reuters on Wednesday.

John Ridding said advertisers were buying ad space with as little as a week's notice, compared with up to nine months a year and a half ago, and he did not expect lead times to return to those levels whenever the recession ended.

"That was then," he told the Reuters Global Media Summit. "What we've seen over the past 18 months is a compression, a very significant compression, in the advertising booking cycle."

He said, however, that the industry in general was definitely seeing signs of stabilization in ad revenues, offering a slightly more optimistic take on a situation that many in the industry consider merely less bad than before.

The Pearson-owned (PSON.L) FT, along with News Corp's (NWSA.O) Wall Street Journal, occupies a global niche for expert financial news that has allowed it to escape the worst of the downturn that has afflicted the general news industry.

Pearson does not break down results for the FT newspaper, but the FT Group -- which includes stakes in other publications -- reported a 3 percent fall in sales in the first nine months of 2009, compared with double-digit declines at many rivals.

The FT has doubled its cover price in Britain to 2 pounds ($3.31) over the past three years while increasing readership and circulation and has also raised prices of Web subscriptions. It gives away only 10 stories per month online to any reader.

Ridding said he had no current plans to raise the UK cover price again.

The FT began charging for news articles on ft.com while most consumer newspapers were giving their stories away, and Ridding said he had no intention of being swayed from that strategy by moves from Google (GOOG.O) or others.

Google has offered to restrict free access to news articles to five per day per publisher, after criticisms from news providers including Rupert Murdoch and threats by publishers to remove their articles from Google News search.

"We've got our model. It's working. We don't really see the need to change it," Ridding said.

MICROPAYMENTS

The FT currently charges for its news online through subscriptions, but Ridding said it planned to start experimenting next year with micropayments -- charging readers small amounts per story, or selling weekly or monthly passes.

He said he was open to partnerships, especially in technology for micropayments, but was not particularly interested in cooperating with other news publishers, although he did not rule it out.

"Mainly, our priority is on our direct relationship with our audience, to gain a deeper understanding of them for product development and for marketing, and also to make sure we have pricing power, because what we don't want to be doing is subsidizing other publishers," he said.

Ridding said he believed micropayments could reinforce a subscription model, rather than competing with it. He added that he was committed to keep investing through tough times.

"You can imagine a scenario where if you're particularly addicted to a particularly columnist, you really need your fix of that columnist, and it was charged appropriately -- reasonably -- you could add it up through the year and find: Well, actually I might as well take out an annual subscription."

Ridding said he was also excited about the opportunity to reach new audiences offered by e-readers such as Amazon's (AMZN.O) Kindle, which allows readers to subscribe to newspapers and read them online on paperback-sized electronic devices.

The FT is already available on the U.S. version of the Kindle, as well as on Apple's (AAPL.O) iPhone, but not yet on the Kindle in Britain, where it has been on sale since October.

"We're negotiating at the moment the pricing points, etc.," he said. "I think it's work in progress."

($1=.6035 Pound)

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by David Cowell and Hans Peters)