Variety Online Pay Wall = Lower Traffic

COMMENTS (20)

• If their wall actually accepted the info I input for a “free” subscription, then they wouldn’t have this problem.

  Comment by D.Z. — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 1:47pm PDT  Reply to this post

• uh, that blackwall thing… what is up on that… nikki has plenty of variety… and as everyone knows, faster.

  Comment by dl subscriber — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 1:55pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Keep in mind you can always get underneath the velvet rope on any Variety page by selecting all, copying and pasting to a word document. Annoying, but hey, it’s easy and free.

  Comment by Mike — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 1:55pm PDT  Reply to this post

  • You can sort of see through their blackout screen anyway. I have to tilt my moniter, but if I really want to read an article (doesn’t happen that often, but occasionally) I adjust the light and tilt the moniter.

    For the record, ScreenDaily has gone back to paid content as well, but all you have to do there is Google the headline and it’s all there, and free.

    Comment by and also — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 5:53pm PDT  Reply to this post

    • toldja!

      Comment by Anonymous — Wednesday April 28, 2010 @ 8:46am PDT  Reply to this post

  • or, when the web page is loading, select STOP on your internet browser, and the black sign in pop up wont appear. This happens because the text loads faster then the ads, so once the text loads select stop loading. At least that works w/ my pc

    Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 8:12pm PDT  Reply to this post

• It would be nice to know if December is historically a bigger entertainment news month. Do Variety and Hollywood Reporter’s traffic and unique visitors always decline between December and March?

  As for the page views dropping by 40%, while this is a big number presumably Variety is making more money from subscriptions than they would from the 1300 CPMs they lost. After all, that’s why they call it a “paywall”.

  More important may be the number of unique visitors declining, since that is truly a figure important when approaching certain advertisers.

  Comment by J. Sperling Reich — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 2:01pm PDT  Reply to this post

• I used to read there all the time, but since December I have only been there once. I even took it out of my favorites because there’s just no point. I can get a lot of the same news here and at the Hollywood Reporter site.

  Comment by Cali — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 2:38pm PDT  Reply to this post

• though i’m not behind the red velvet rope, they still like to invite me to a bunch of crap seminars i would never go to.

  Comment by red velvet rope — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 2:43pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Why on earth would you go to Variety now when they have that pay wall. Just come here. What are they stupid? I don’t even go there anymore. Why bother. I can come here or to the hollywood reporter for free. They’re insane. Everyone over there should start looking for jobs. The strike brought the future in so fast. Not only did writing staffs get cut in half but Nikki FInke killed the trades.

  Comment by Hello? — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 2:47pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Duh, indeed. I’ve focused my attention to Deadline and THR.

  Comment by M — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 3:06pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Who every thought of that “ingenious” move to charge Variety readers hard bucks to access their homepage? A cool 40 % drop is the result. Sure, traditionally news should be paid for and the online V. reader payed by every page click cause there are those little ads right and left on our screen. That’s how Variety made ad money. But no, V. wanted more – and they failed miserably. Readers simply got their news else where – for free.

  In December I discovered deadline.com, by the way, because I searched the net – for free news (and some pretty damn good ones I have to ad)

  …. and other readers / commentators pls. refrain from the lovely gadget, that gives us the paid Variety news for free

  Comment by Tempelhof — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 3:27pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Hey, want to know a secret? Click “Stop” in your browser as soon as the page loads. It will subsequently stop the pay wall from loading.

  Thank me later

  Comment by Kanye East — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 3:54pm PDT  Reply to this post

• What’s Variety? If you want real news about what’s going on in Hollywood and not press releases, everyone knows you read Deadline. It’s got all the breaking news first and fast.

  Comment by Who Cares — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 5:19pm PDT  Reply to this post

• I subscribe to Variety for the news and have recently decided to just let the subscription run out and not renew.

  F’ the velvet rope. Each and every time I hit the paywall, I have to enter and then re-enter all my info. It’s such a pain in the ass and as a result I don’t even bother trying to go to Variety.com So, now they have lost my eyeballs online and they are about to loose a paying print subscriber.

  And yes, I also get loads and loads of unwanted spam about registering for various Variety seminars and conferences. Often the same form letter email from various sales and marketing people.

  Comment by Studio exec — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 6:38pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Advertise with Variety! Higher ad rates for less eyeballs!

  Idiots.

  Comment by humperdinck — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 6:58pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Of course online traffic went down. The point is to keep print subscribers from dropping, since print’s what pays the bills, for now. It may be short-term thinking, but nothing else print has tried works (aside from getting grants, e.g. ProPublica). The #1 reason people give from dropping their NYT subscriptions is that the online version is free. The money NYT gets from online ads is a fraction of print ads and paid circulation.

  Comment by CKitchin — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 8:44pm PDT  Reply to this post

• Funnily enough, the old Variety pay wall could be circumvented just as easily as the new one. It’s as if it’s company policy to half-ass.

  Comment by Russell — Tuesday April 27, 2010 @ 11:18pm PDT  Reply to this post

• There’s a Firefox add-on called QuickJava. It lets you turn JavaScript support on and off with a small button. It makes bypassing the pay-wall pretty easy. When the blackwall appears, you click to turn JavaScript off, reload the page and start reading.

  Comment by Firefoxy — Wednesday April 28, 2010 @ 5:50am PDT  Reply to this post

• just do what i do, click the refresh button and then the cancel button after the article has reloaded

  Comment by Cpt Danger Awesome — Wednesday April 28, 2010 @ 12:31pm PDT  Reply to this post