The partnership, which comes a year after a similar deal between Flipboard and the New York Times, will grant full access to FT subscribers while casual visitors will be able to read a smattering of FT blog posts and cultural stories.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, said by phone that the deal will involve the FT and Flipboard sharing advertising revenue, but would not disclose what the exact revenue split is. In the past, the ad splits have been a source of contention for some publishers, including Condé Nast, which pulled back its advertisements from titles like New Yorker and Wired. (A Flipboard spokesperson said the company has an “excellent relationship” with Conde and is partnering on ads for six other titles).

Grimshaw also said that the FT is exploring selling subscriptions through Flipboard, and would be willing to share some of the proceeds with the platform. This is significant because the FT made waves by leaving iTunes in part due to the 30 percent commission (or “vig,” as the Brits call it) that Apple takes from every publisher.

So why is the FT willing to partner up with Flipboard so soon after leaving Apple? Grimshaw says the difference lies in how the two platforms treat customer relationships.

“The issue is not so much a percentage, it’s the relationship between publisher and audience. Paying a 30 percent finder’s fee is okay. Paying 30 percent in perpetuity and not knowing who the customer is not okay.”

The Flipboard partnership also reflects the fact that the FT and other publishers are keen to get their stories in as many places as possible at a time when readers are consuming more and more content on mobile. As for the future role of Flipboard, which some describe as a “giant iceberg” in the way of publishers, Grimshaw had this to say:

“I think the really interesting aspect to the platform is the way they’re giving readers the ability to create a bespoke user experience. I personally think this is going to be a strong strand in publishing and consumption of news in the digital space.”

Correction: This article was updated at 2:40pm to state that Conde Nast titles had pulled ads from certain titles; Conde did not, as previously stated, break off the relationship.

On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.

“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.

While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the web vs. app debate – standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores. (We’ll be digging into the web vs. app debate with three influential publishers at paidContent Live later this month.)

The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.

“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.

He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.

“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”

For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.

The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.

Afterward, Grimshaw spoke to Andrews in a separate Q&A about the end of print, HTML5, Windows 8 and social sharing.

Watch the full video of the session, embedded below:

“Right now, we’re at a very exciting point. We’re only just short of the time when digital subscriptions will overtake print circulation.”

The FT has 285,000 digital subscribers and a 305,685 average daily circulation (ABC, April 2012). It looks like the paper could reach the cross-over early in 2013.

Last week, I wrote how News International’s The Times may be set for the same milestone not long later. Each is seeing print circulation decline (down 18 percent in a year at FT) but digital custom grow (up 32 percent at FT).

A crossover would show that each can migrate readers to digital and yet still have an actual business to show for it.

Read more about my panel discussion with Grimshaw and Piano Media’s Tomas Bella at paidContent 2012.

FT.com took the step after negotiations about in-app subscriptions broke down over Apple’s demands to take a hefty cut of the subscription fees. “We felt that the terms that Apple were offering were detrimental… to our business,” explained Grimshaw. Asked whether he lost a big promotional opportunity by leaving the iTunes store, he replied: “I don’t need Apple to tell the world the Financial Times is here. We’ve been here for 120 years.” He added that iOS apps don’t seem to be working for publishers, as they’re not bringing in enough revenue. Said Grimshaw: “I’m not sure it’s all that it’s cracked up to be.”

Grimshaw also shared some experiences with taking FT.com behind a paywall, which has been largely a success for the publisher, with now 285,000 people paying for access to the site. He said the biggest challenge early on wasn’t to find the right price point as much as to find the right mindset within the company: “Publishers are used to being B2B operators. We didn’t know our customers.”

Grimshaw was joined on the panel by Piano Media CEO Tomas Bella, whose company is operating a joint-industry payment platform that gives paying customers access to paid content across a wide variety of sites. Piano started off in Slovakia, but wants to be in a total of five markets by the end of the year. Bella said that his company’s approach works particularly well for smaller publishers who don’t offer as much value to their readers as a big entity like FT.com. “The system was created to lower the barrier to payment,” he explained.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, alluded to the challenges that lie ahead for publishers: “Just because we’ve opened a shop doesn’t mean we’ve become retailers.” The lessons are worth learning: In the slightly tongue-in-cheek words of moderator Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the FT, “We’d all rather be Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) than some boring old newspaper company.”

Some takeaways:

The Single Thing With the Biggest Payback Social networking is not a panacea: “We get traffic from the social channel, but more from either e-mail or from people just having bookmarked the site,” said Gilt’s Lyne. “Personalization is probably the single thing you could focus on that will have the largest payback.” Some of that, she said, is self-generated: “Asking people to self-identify as liking ‘x’ brand, or wanting to read more about this or that.”

But Gilt has also started heavily personalizing all of the e-mails it sends out. There are now “literally hundreds of thousands of versions of the e-mails,” Lyne said. “It starts when you come in; we separate you by being male or female, and where you live. But over time, we look at your browsing behavior and your buying behavior–anything you’ve tried to add to your cart and not been able to, anything you’ve waitlisted–to get a sense of what your sizes are. We layer that on top of vertical data, so we get more data. We run it every night, so the next day your e-mail has been ordered in such a way that the brands you’re interested in and the sizes you wear are at the top. It’s all automated.” This process hasn’t yet been extended to Gilt’s website, because that is such a big undertaking. But “if we could change the site 800,000 ways, we’d do so,” said Lyne. “And in time, we will.”

Beyond Product Descriptions. “The type of content we seek to provide has to meet the needs of a parent or grandparent.,” said Andrew Kovan, chief of marketing and digital commerce at toy company Melissa & Doug. ” There used to be less emphasis on content, specifically, and more on content in general: Product descriptions, or four images. Now the content has to accomplish something, and it’s moving into the realm of video. How do we make sure we’re providing the right content in the right places to get that conversion–which may happen offline in our case.”

The Value of Niches. “As we’ve started to get more information about how people read articles on the site and the journeys they then take, what has started to become clear is that the value is not necessarily where you think of it,” said Grimshaw. “Some of our more niche content about commodities, for example, is actually incredibly effective at convincing people to subscribe. When you have that info, you start to look at those areas in very different ways and think of additional content to put around them–it’s not just a backwater. Picking out niche opportunities is key to getting this right.”

Lyne agreed. “When we do a sale on shoes, we end up with the women’s size 5 1/2 and 11 at the end of it,” she said. That used to be a “challenge, the leftovers.” Then “we realized, wait, we’ve got ‘x’ number of people we know wear a size 11. So why not create a private sale for them?”

What Content Means For Retailers “We photograph almost everything that we sell ourselves,” Lyne said. “At the forefront, we’re investing in styling clothes that will make them appeal to a certain consumer. So take certain brands that may have been perceived as a little more old-fashioned–by breaking up Carolina Herrera suits, showing the top with a pair of jeans and a great T-shirt–suddenly Carolina Herrera becomes a cool brand for 25-year-olds.” Moderator Edgecliffe-Johnson broke in–something he did more than once when Lyne was speaking about something interesting–to ask if Gilt is in competition with magazines. “Yeeeeeeeah,” said Lyne slowly. “It’s part of our sell to vendors: We’ll bring your brand to a new market base and bring back business intelligence to you. We give vendors a [free] breakdown after the sale, with the demographics of who bought what and which things were most popular.” In other ways, too, Gilt has evolved its sites after watching news sites. “Gilt Taste has a very heavy content component to it and we brought Ruth Reichl in to be the editor,” Lyne said. “Our thought was, let’s engage with that foodie community and celebrate artisanal food producers, so that over time people who come initially for content will also use us as a source for food.”

For Melissa & Doug’s Kovan, a large part of content is “the user-generated piece–images, videos, Facebook comments. I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that that content sets the stage for what happens when the customer buys the product.” Melissa & Doug just signed a content share agreement with Grandparents.com, and Kovan said he’s open to other such partnerships, which he believes can add value to both brands participating.

For The Financial Times, Small Changes Meant Twice As Many Subscriptions. “Customers are very sensitive to small things,” said FT.com’s Grimshaw. The company tested different subscription “barrier” pages–changing only some wording and content and keeping the price and package the same. “After two months of experimentation, we were selling twice as many subscriptions,” he said. “It was an astonishing revelation, that small changes in the design of one stage of that process could make such a big difference.”

Shopping As Entertainment. “We take a lot from media in our commerce business,” Lyne said. “We program our site every day and it’s new every day. We launch at noon with a completely new set of vendors. It’s the idea of being ready for an audience and trying to put your best face forward every single day, and assuming that at least a part of shopping is also entertainment.”

Loyalty Means Something Different Now. “The traditional way of looking at loyalty doesn’t match the ways people engage with brands anymore,” said Irving Fain, CEO of brand engagement software company CrowdTwist. “People may engage for days, weeks or months before a purchase is made. Now all the interaction that people have with content is a transaction that has value–watching a video and seeing a product in action, or sharing a link.”

The “real currency” now may be a shared e-mail address. “Getting people to say ‘Yes, I would like to receive e-mail from you’ is increasingly difficult, because, as you all know, your inbox is a nightmare,” Lyne said. “Every deal site in the world is offering you the best deals on the planet, there are multiple newsletters coming at you. Inbox clutter is an increasing challenge to anybody trying to develop an ongoing relationship with a consumer.”

“We started off not knowing what could be achieved (in HTML),” Grimshaw said. “But, one by one, we found that all the things that could be done in a native app actually could be done in a HTML5 app – and we haven’t had to compromise on anything, though we were expecting to.

“We’ve benefited from our exposure in the app store – Apple were very good, they promoted our app quite heavily and we were very grateful. But app stores are not a panacea. There are something like 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, 150,000 on Google’s – these are turning into pretty crowded environments. The search and discovery tools are not that great and there are limited ways to market your app.

“So, whilst we will lose some exposure through not being in the App Store, we will also gain the opportunity to do a whole bunch of things that, previously, we weren’t able to do.”

With just a few weeks to go before the June 30 deadline, the FT‘s move looks a little designed to show Apple what publishers can do without depending on it. But there was also practical impetus behind the development…

“It’s not just Apple versus FT – there is more to it than that. We started to look at HTML middle of last year when we realised how complicated it would be to develop applications for all these different platforms.

“This was something we had in mind anyway. It happened that Apple made it commercially important as well. We’ve accelerated what we were doing, but it isn’t just about Apple.

“The worst situation would have been to reach June 30 and find Apple and the FT can’t agree and readers are left without access to their content. We felt we had to make sure there was an alternative, no matter what happened with Apple.

“We’ve got a very firm foundation to build on and can very quickly turn around great mobile products for our reader. It was worth taking time to get that stuff right.”

“We continue to talk with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). We had discussions today, we have more planned next week, and we still hope to reach an agreement, but we are getting quite close to the wire so I haven’t bet my house on it.”

Some publishers like Time (NYSE: TWX) Inc have accommodated the new terms by granting in-app access to existing magazine subscribers but not taking new subscriptions inside their apps – a veritable no-win for all sides.

But, for the FT, Grimshaw says: “Some of the contortions that other publishers are going through in order to comply don’t feel right to us. We want to be consistent across channels and offer our readers a consistent experience in terms of how they access and buy the subscription product. We shouldn’t have to go through contortions.

“If I was a publisher starting from scratch with paid content, I had no pre-existing relationship with readers and no history of selling subscriptions, then iTunes probably looks very attractive; it shortcuts a very big problem — how do you take payments from people? — and also offers the ability of having a direct relationship with some of them. We come from a position of having a previous business which we’ve built successfully for the past couple of years, with 224,000 digital subscribers.

“We’ve evolved that model by having a direct relationship with the reader. We feel it isn’t broken so don’t fix it. We’re also very conscious of what we might lose if we enter in to agreements that compromise us.

“We won’t be stepping off the iPad — we might not be on iTunes. Over half our traffic on iPad comes through the browser anyway; that doesn’t get talked about much in the media. We won’t be slow to show people the FT in an app form.”

Grimshaw said the HTML5 app now makes it easy for The Financial Times to quickly repackage the core as apps for multiple new platforms, like Android Honeycomb, which would only require a light wrapper app around the web content. He is more enthusiastic about putting a such a tablet app in to Android Marketplace because, there, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) would take only five percent. That’s still five percent more than were the FT to take new subscribers from the open web, but an acceptable cut.

Audience tweets clearly were against the case for charging. Reuters’ blogger Felix Salmon applauded an apparent admission from The Atlantic’s Smith: “Go Justin Smith! Admitting that general-interest ideas-based brands can’t charge for content online.”

Not exactly the last word on the matter, but it certainly demonstrates that not everyone believes paywalls will save publishers.

Two other panelists at paidContent2010′s The Business of Digital News session, KC Estenson, CNN.com’s SVP and GM, and Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s SVP of digital media, talked about the opportunities that apps and e-devices present for publishers looking for new revenue streams. Josh Cohen, Google’s senior business product manager, meanwhile, explains why news organizations that blame on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are shooting the messenger. See highlights of the panel below.

Full uncut session