Felix Salmon: “One of the reasons why there are so few financial blogs is that there are very few free sources of financial information online. Think what would happen if the FT gave up on online subscriptions and put all of its stories online for free and forever like the BBC and the Guardian. It would immediately become a bloggers’ darling, its traffic would go through the roof, and it quite possibly would spawn dozens of websites around the world linking predominantly to it. FT stories would start rising up the Google rankings to where they belonged, and the site would become the first place to go for anybody looking for any kind of global financial information.”

I’ve just about given up kvetching about FT.com. I love the newspaper, but the website is, and always has been, woeful. If the FT could get its website right, I suspect Felix’s analysis is correct.

The problem the FT faces as a business, however, is more complex. Its circulation is tiny, both in the UK and globally. To make matters worse, virtually all of its ad revenue comes from the UK, even though its circulation is largely outside the UK (and it is only growing outside the UK). Lots of business publishers have run aground on the Scylla of global advertising. There may be (and I think there is) a worldwide market of globally aware corporate executives, but there is a desperately small group of advertisers willing to court them as a group. The FT is aimed at those globally aware readers, but it’s very hard to convert that to significant revenue.