The Financial Times...

...began charging readers for access to its Web site in 2002. Now it's...

...adding to its paid-content strategy with a plan to accept micropayments for individual articles, as an alternative to a subscription.

...ad revenue has fallen sharply at The Financial Times...probably down at least 20 percent compared with last year...last month operating profit had fallen 40 percent in the first half of the year, with revenue down 13 percent...

The print circulation has also fallen, with sales in June down 7 percent from a year earlier, to about 412,000 copies.

FT.com has not attracted a huge paying audience, with about 117,000 worldwide, up from 101,000 in 2007.

In this environment they're going to erect pay walls? Good luck with that. I don't know about you, but I didn't like logging in even when it was free. It just wasn't worth the trouble and I could never remember my password anyway. There's just so much free content on the Web that I don't see how pay walls could ever work. It's hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Does the FT really think its product is that great, or unique? What about The Wall Street Journal, you might ask? I wonder how many of their current subscribers would continue to subscribe if their employers didn't pay for those subscriptions. And I wonder how many of those employers would continue to pay for those subscriptions if they didn't get to write them off as a business expense. The free-market bible is government subsidized? Ouch.