Is it just us or has FT.com put a load more of its stuff behind a subscription wall? We're sure you used to get at least some of the day's business news for free.
We can't blame them really. It's good content, and the people who really depend on it to make commercial decisions (as opposed to dilettante browsers like us) can probably afford to pay for it.
Plus, hopefully, it leaves more eyeballs for us champions of free access.
To be honest, no one has really worked out a good way of making pots of cash by taking a newspaper and putting it online. The FT, like everyone else, once thought that advertising alone would do it. They used to crow over the strategy of their bitterest foe, the Wall Street Journal, which charges for everything. Then the bubble burst, the share price tanked, the costs got cut and the subscription charges kicked in.
We, of course, scorn revenue and throw our content freely onto internet for the love of good writing, the urge to increase the sum of human knowledge and enthusiasm for the principle of the commons that underpins the evolution of the internet.
It's not a cheap enterprise, mind. So if you fancy a bit of mouse clicking practice you could do worse than hit the ads on this page a couple of hundred times....
