First before I start, to do is Friday the 5th of March, and it’s the day that after 6 years, Andy Andreou finally leaves TradeDoubler. All the best Andy at Quidco, I’m sure that you’ll make a big impact.

As previous blogs will attest to, one of the longest ongoing topics of discussion in UK online media monetziation circles is whether media owners should be erecting paywalls around their content. Looking today at the Guardian’s (free and open) digital media news section, there were examples of the two main competing philosophies.

On the side of the open web was Sly Bailey, chief executive of the Trinity Mirror group of newspapers, who was the opinion that it would be difficult to charge for news content when similar would remain available for free. Sitting behind the paywall is FT Chief Executive, John Ridding, pointing to a 43% increase in digital revenues from a 15% increase in digital subscribers, notice the discrepancy in those figures.

Ridding argues that by gaining digital subscribers, this doesn’t just point to an uplift in revenue, but also in the level of interaction between the user and the site. A subscriber will give more information back to the media owner as to therier profile and what they actually wish to use the site for, a level of detail and profiling that many open sites would kill for.

The FT has been partially subscription based for some time, and in their case it hasn’t so much been erecting a new fire wall as extending an existing one. The FT has to my mind advantages over more generalist titles such as The Mirror or The Daily Mail in that the audience is already more defined and self selecting, and faces less competition from alternative sources.

Indeed the FT could also be likened to a trade paper for chief executives, CFOs and bankers. That is of course not entirely true or fair, but this does make it easier for the FT to put pay barriers up, as the content has more chance of being unique and necessary for the readers to access.

Another major difference is that the FT audience is smaller than that for more mainstream titles and it is going to be far more likely to be able to write off an FT.com subscription as a business expense than it is to the Daily Mirror. The FT article is available here, whereas more from Trinity Mirror’s Sly Bailey can be seen here. And there’ll be more from me soon.

Rob, Founder, One