Business newspaper the Financial Times has introduced a raft of changes to its subscription policies, but so far, has stopped short of full free access to its content. FT.com is to introduce a new 30 free views a month system to increase access to the site, whilst a new corporate content licence was also announced for major businesses looking to use FT content across the organisation.

From mid-October FT.com will offer each user 30 free articles a month via a simple form of registration. Users will then be asked to subscribe for further access to the core material available. Ien Cheng, publisher of FT.com told his own site the changes will improve access to FT content for bloggers and news aggregators, who in-turn will link back to FT material. "The figure of 30 is not random. We have studied carefully how people come to the site," he said.

An overhaul of the site is also set to take place introducing new market sections, videos and blogs as well as technical improvements. The FT has been testing the model overseas. Currently users pay a £99 subscription fee, which delivers between £7 and £9 million in revenue to the Pearson owned group.

A new Corporate Content Licence has also been introduced, allowing an organisation with 10 or more employees to pay an annual fee. This will deliver the full range of FT content to individuals in the organisation on any platform including PDAs, portals and intranets. The Corporate Content Licence will be introduced from April 2008.

Changes in the FT access terms has drawn parallels with the recent announcement by the New York Times (NYT) that it has dropped all online access charges. NYT is believed to have signed away £5 million in revenue from online subscribers. Chief search strategist of the NYT Marshall Simmonds recently explained to IWR sister title Search Engine Watch that registration pages simply block search engines from crawling valuable content. NYT has an archive of 13 million pages to offer.

Access charge changes by the FT and NYT have been hastened by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp acquisition of the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch said a free Wall Street Journal would be "wonderful".

In announcing the Corporate Content Licence Casper de Bono, FT MD B2B admitted it will change the relationship the FT has with aggregators. "We are respectful of their business model and of ours and their customers needs, which is why we have given a six month notice of the licence."

From April for an organisation to receive FT content for use within the organisation it must in affect have the FT's equivalent of a TV licence. Factiva being acquired by Murdoch he said was incidental and that these licences are a continuation of the embargoes placed on FT content within aggregators in 2005.