According to Robert Andrews, the Financial Times will start giving college students free access to the website via a promotional Facebook application launching tomorrow. Any student that adds the application can get a 12-month subscription that can be renewed for up to four years. This makes it worth close to $800 for students. This is a great example of a promotional campaign effectively leveraging Facebook applications.

The promotional campaign’s purpose is to find new subscribers. In their statement to Robert Andrews of PaidContent, the Financial Times stated that this was part of a broader movement of opening up the site for free in a segmented way. Large media companies are rapidly seeking new way of generating revenue in the highly competitive and mostly free internet content industry.

This is also a great model for getting more registrants to the FT.com site which currently has registered just over 250,000 users.