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No Such Thing as a Free Variety

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Written by April Yorke   
Thursday, 10 December 2009 09:21

Variety has decided to resurrect their pay wall starting, oh, today. The plan is to ask one in 10 users for their user name and password (previously emailed to subscribers) and to gradually turn off the tap over the next two months to five free views per month for the rest of us plebs. While Variety  is wealth of information, I tend to turn to it more for the occasional in-depth piece rather than the daily news (this week: "Film composers lose luster"), so I'm not terribly broken up about this.

About a month ago, a publicist I work with mentioned that this would be coming, not about Variety specifically, but that we should expect a trend of free online news sources shifting to subscriber sites. The question, of course, is whether advertisers will follow. It's no secret that traditional media makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertisers rather than subscribers (ooo, the product they sell is you! Scary!). So why is limiting the number of eyeballs you can sell to advertisers a good thing? Will users gradually come on board with the pay-for-product model that the internet has been savvy enough to eschew, or will the Globe and Mail just give up entirely and unlock their street corner dispensers?

You know what? We should just bring back newsies. Those kids had hustle:

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 December 2009 23:44
 

April Yorke is a (Cult)ure Magazine contributor since Wednesday, 07 January 2009.

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