Pando erects paywall of irrelevance

Pando, occasional unapologetic copyright thieves, have decided to erect a paywall:

From today, the newest articles on Pando will be available to members first. Membership costs just $10 a month (or $100 a year, if you pay upfront) and members also get unlimited access to our entire video archive and to our real world events, in person and via livestream.

I guess we’ll find out how many people are willing to pay for undifferentiated opinion in a heavily over-provided news space (startup-centric tech), huh? Having spent over a decade working with paywalled business, both successful and unsuccessful, it’s pretty clear that people will pay for news they can use – and not undifferentiated news and opinion. My experience of reading Pando is that they have the latter not the former – but maybe there’s a content strategy shift at play, too.

They clearly think there will be enough people signing on to inflate their tech costs:

To coincide with our new membership model, we’ve spent months redesigning Pando from the ground up, including moving away from WordPress VIP to our own in-house CMS.

Building your own CMS can work – if you have the funding and focus of, say, Buzzfeed:

Pando has raised less than four million dollars in funding, ever — around 1/25th of the amount raised by Buzzfeed.

Oh, well. Never mind.