Variety.com putting up paywall

Posted by Nestor Bailly on December 10, 2009 at 4:48 PM

In the latest spat of paywall constructions, Variety.com, the entertainment industry newspaper's website, has announced plans to charge for online content starting today, Thursday.

From the official announcement: "Variety will begin its rollout of the website's paywall as part of an overall revamp of the publication's subscription structure.

After clicking on two pages of content at Variety.com, one in 10 randomly selected visitors will be prompted to register for further access. Print and digital subscribers who have logged in with a user name and password have full access to Variety.com. Nonsubscribers may access only five pages of content in any given month."

Only five pages a month? One in ten randomly selected visitors? I don't really understand this paid content model, but apparently it takes cues from the hybrid model FT.com uses. The weirdest part is that Variety.com used to have a paywall - it was defamed and dismantled in early 2007.

But now tough competition from new sites and decreasing ad revenue has sparked the paywall's reconstruction, and its hard to see how they will make it work given their past failure.

Variety Group president Neil Stiles has said: "We have a very specific audience, so we haven't suffered circulation attrition in proportion to the rest of the landscape--but that could change next year, two years down the line, if we keep giving content away for free. We want to build up a habit of people paying for online content in the same way that they pay for offline."

Content unaffected by the paywall includes the home page, headlines, brief article summaries and search results. Similarly, Variety news will continue to be aggregated online, as it has in the past, and there are no plans to de-index from Google.

"This initial phase allows us to gather more information about our paying customers worldwide and hone the user experience so we can continue to provide the best subscriber experience for all paying customers," Stiles continued. "The number of unique visitors to Variety will decline, but the people who remain on the site are our core audience. These are ultimately the people we want to reach."

Ah, the El Dorado of core audience, the 5% that will pay, the East-Coast infovores that news organizations hope will support their businesses during the decline of advertising.

Source: Variety.com, paidContent