Jon Slade in conversation with Press Gazette editor in chief Dominic Ponsford at the 2026 Future of Media Technology Conference. Picture: Press Gazette/ASV Photography
Financial Times CEO Jon Slade has revealed how the business title has bucked wider industry trends by attracting a relatively large young online audience.
He also revealed how the FT’s AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI include “red button” clauses whereby it can pull the plug if it is unhappy with the way content is being used. And he shared details of the enormous scale of attacks on the FT website by bots seeking to steal content.
Slade, who has been CEO of the FT Group since July 2025 and was formerly chief commercial officer of the business, was the opening keynote speaker at Press Gazette Future of Media Technology conference in London on Thursday, 10 September.
He began by revealing that 80% of the FT’s £540m of annual global revenue (2024 total) now comes from digital sources, versus 10% when he first joined the business in 2002.
And he said that so far the FT has not been hit by changes to referral traffic from Google and social media which have heavily impacted other publishers, like Reach which yesterday announced a further 220 redundancies .
He said: “The majority of our traffic to our site and the majority of the monetisation comes from having a direct relationship with our readers who come to us, they seek us out, they seek out the brand, and they come to us to read our journalism…
“The whole point really of having a subscription business and putting the audience as your primary customer is that it puts control in your hands. So you’re less exposed to the things that are happening with third parties and changes in technology. That’s been the driving principle of the business over the last 20 years.”
He said that increasing the number of “recognised users” who have registered with the FT (possibly to read an email) and also given consent to be marketed to was a key metric for the business.
He said: “They are a subset of the overall number. We can engage that audience over time, and we can encourage them to become subscribers over time…
“If you asked me how many page views I had last month, I couldn’t tell you. If you asked me how many engaged subscribers we had, I wouldn’t tell you, but I know.”
Reaching more young readers set as strategic goal for business
Last month, Press Gazette revealed new analysis of UK website audience data from Ipsos iris which revealed the FT is the national newspaper brand with the highest proportion of readers aged under 35 (comprising 27% of the total).
Most audience data suggests people in this age group are far less likely to visit publisher websites and tend to get their news from social media and Youtube.
Slade said the FT has put “a lot of time and effort into building our younger audiences” via something called the “Future Audiences Initiative”.
He said: “The first thing we did was to make it a strategic priority for the company. There were lots of micro efforts going on around the company, but we said ‘okay, this is something that we need to join up, and it’s going to become an initiative at a strategic company level’.”
He said the goal was to reach 850,000 registered readers under the age of 35 by 2030 and that they were well on track to reach that target.
He added: “There are some cultural changes that we had to make as well. We are, as a subscription business, really good at spending money on acquiring subscribers, but it tends to have a two-year return for the investment that we make.
“What we had to say in this case was: let’s be a little bit more thoughtful, a bit more long-term, a bit more strategic about this, and recognise that we are not necessarily going to convert them into subscribers overnight. It’s going to take time, so we have to find the resource to invest, but recognise that we’re not going to see that return back in this calendar year.”
A cross-functional team pulling together staff from editorial, product, technology and marketing leads the Future Audiences Initiative.
Tactics aimed at reaching younger readers have included launching FT Explains, a mobile-first video series explaining complex issues; a weekly free Substack newsletter for the Alphaville markets blog (which has “grown much faster than our traditional newsletters”); and a scheme whereby the FT is available for free to anyone in education under the age of 18.
Slade said: “It’s about finding them, talking to them in an environment where they are, and giving them a reason to understand how the FT can help them in their schoolwork, their university application, their first job application, their first promotion.
“So trying to make ourselves relevant at those different points, and the theme that we build around that is going from schoolroom to boardroom.”
FT has signed AI licensing deals but keeps control over content use
The FT has signed AI content licensing deals with OpenAI and Google.
Slade said these deals gave the FT control over how much content can be quoted in AI answers, clear references when it is used as a source, and added “we have a right to say ‘we don’t like this’.”
He said: “If the data shows us that something’s wrong, it’s not working for us, we call it the big red button. If we want we can press that big red button and take ourselves out of any further provision of live feed.
“We recognise that once the salt is in the soup, so to speak, it’s very difficult to remove that. But we want to experiment and to be in those environments. Controlled licensing agreements allow us to do that. What we are extremely uncomfortable with is uncontrolled theft of our journalism.”
Slade revealed that the FT has built its own tool to stop unauthorised bots scraping its site and recently found that in one eight-hour window a single trial account user (who paid £1 for a month’s FT access) made 1.23 million page access requests from 681,000 unique IP addresses, which were all blocked.
He said: “That is unlicensed crawling of our website. That is where the theft is going on. So we have to block that, and we have to be really tight about managing that.”
The FT is not currently involved in any legal actions against AI companies for unauthorised crawling and Slade said that so far “we would rather take the route of presenting what we see as an opportunity for the person that’s accessing our website to do so in a way that’s more helpful for them, and try and structure the licence arrangement around that”.
The FT offers its own AI answer engine called Ask FT to its top-tier professional users, trained on the FT’s archive of articles back to 2004.
Asked about the success of this, Slade said: “Our experience there is that you have to work really hard to make sure the response is accurate…
“We found that from a customer point of view, just saying ‘ask us anything’ isn’t that helpful because they don’t always know what question they want to ask.
“Starting to introduce prompts, ‘you can ask questions like’, has made a big difference in terms of engagement.”
Asked what he had learned about leadership so far from his time as FT CEO, Slade said: “One of the things that I’ve noticed is everybody’s really good at change until you say ‘it’s you that needs to change’ or ‘it’s your team that needs to change’.
“It underlines for me the importance of saying ‘look, here’s all the things we’re getting right. Here’s what the world looks like in 2030. Here are these big disruptive factors that are happening to us: changing reading habits, technology, macro volatility, the assault on trust and truth. These are the things we have to navigate, and here’s the plan to get there.’
“So if you can put a plan out and you can say ‘we’re doing well, let’s build on those foundations’, then I think people can rally around the cause of change.”
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