Back in June Variety.com Added a Paywall - This Was the Impact | Hacker News Reader

Back in June Variety.com Added a Paywall - This Was the Impact

quantcast.com

27 pointsuptown11 comments

The chart shows the number of readers. It does not claim to show any change in revenue.

It's true that their decline in readership was about 200x. But is it possible that each of those paid readers makes up for what they've presumably lost from ad revenue? Maybe not, but we've got nowhere near enough information here to draw a conclusion.

The chart shows the number of computers on which the quantcast widget was loaded. The drastic decline makes me suspect that the widget is no longer being displayed on most pages for logged-in users.

Sure. But with an ad-driven model, each reader brings in fractions of a penny per visit. With a subscription model, each reader brings in much more (depending on price and visit count, probably several cents per visit).

It might just balance out, a small number of valuable readers versus a large number of low-revenue readers.

I tried to focus on a purely technical issue: what the widget is actually measuring.

I'm not a subscriber, so I can't tell if they are still displaying the quantcast widget at all anymore. For example, perhaps it's only being shown on their help page, etc.

Whether or not they lost actual visitors is another question. Whether or not losing actual visitors is a problem when you're making money off the ones you keep is another question. But I didn't comment on those.

I'm wondering how much can be attributed to how Quantcast measures traffic. Compete.com and Alexa, for example, both show a decline, but it's nowhere close to being as dramatic as the Quantcast one.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/variety.com/ http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/variety.com

That's quite the depressing chart. From their site:

"Want more? Register now for FREE!

We offer our readers two articles, columns, photos or videos per month, but you can get three more by completing our free registration."

It's not even a complete paywall - they're giving a couple pages away for free and with free registration, three more. What a rough industry to be in.

Go to variety.com, view source, and search for quant. Notice anything? Compare with other "directly measured" sites like stackoverflow or mahalo.

I don't believe that graph. I'm sure their traffic went down dramatically, but that looks more like a problem with quantcast's tracking than anything else. How could they support the site if it was only getting less than 300 visitors a day?

They had a paywall on the site originally years ago. Frankly, I never understood why they removed it. They're a publication, like the WSJ, covering a specific industry to something of a niche audience that will gladly pay for subs.

To me the more interesting story is that someone like Nikki Finke can come out of nowhere and one up them with free content.

Is this the full impact? Presumably, they wouldn't leave it on if subscription revenue didn't outweigh that lost from advertising.

Presumably they were having revenue trouble before, switched to a paywall in hopes it would increase revenue and have been furiously hoping that some tweak or fix of the system will get revenue up to a sustainable level.

But it's quite possible that they are screwed with or without the paywall, and they think this is the only hope. Though it's only been on for a few months, maybe they think it needs more time to prove itself.

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