FT Tilt lists and sinks: a cautionary tale of product development
The Financial Times closed FT Tilt on 13 October which was a big surprise and a bigger disappointment because it bore so many of the hallmarks of a successful web media product: it was niche, it was a rich source of hard-to-get information, it aggregated content and viewpoints, it filtered information really well, it was aimed at a wealthy, professional and highly interested target market who might be expected to participate and even shell-out to cross a paywall.
Tilt was an emerging markets news service created by Paul Murphy, an editor with a successful track record in product innovation with the markets blog FT Alphaville. The powerful idea underlying Tilt was that the source of global market influence was tilting (their pun) to the BRICs and that you couldn’t rely on reporters in London, New York or Tokyo to get the best information about what was happening in Shanghai, Sao Paulo or Mumbai, you had to go to the source. Tilt was all about creating a network of organisations and individuals in situ in emerging markets and aggregating and distributing their intelligence to a community of market analysts and investors in global financial markets around the world, people who are part of the FT’s natural constituency.
So why did it fail? Almost certainly not because it wasn’t a good idea. Felix Salmon in his blog at Reuters argued that
