I'm a long-time FT subscriber, who has grown increasingly unhappy with how the FT advertising team treats paying subscribers. So I'll just take this opportunity to advise anyone considering subscribing to the FT to reconsider.

The base FT digital subscription is something like $400pa. Certainly not cheap. It's mainly business news. Serious journalism, not USA Today or the Daily Mail.

Anyway, over the last 6 months, the FT's in-app advertising has got progressively more and more intrusive. It is now not unusual to find, for one short article, one ad per screen of text, up to 7 per article. Even worse, many of the ads are videos or animations. So you're trying to read the text of an article, when all around it videos are flashing and moving and trying to grab your attention. How are we meant to focus on their journalists' words? Plus the FT app engagement team is taking all kinds of actions that are actively hostile to readers, such as slowing down the scrolling as you hit an ad. The latest "improvement" is to make the "Comments" icon at the top of the article jump to an ad just above the comments, rather than the comments themselves.

In short, just because you're a subscriber, this doesn't mean the FT treats you with any kind of respect.

P.S. While I'm in "rant against the FT" mode, earlier this week, the FT app added the "helpful" feature of showing the length of each article: "3 minutes" etc, in the style of Medium blog posts. Except it isn't Medium, it's a daily newspaper with newspaper article-length stories, plus occasional long-form stories already subtitled "The Big Read". Cluttering up the limited UI with more useless features that noone needs, thoughtlessly copied from a completely different medium. Whichever product owner led that change, congratulations...