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# Pando erects paywall of irrelevance
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2015/06/pando-erects-paywall-of-irrelevance/
- Published: 2015-06-22T22:25:55.000Z
- Updated: 2015-06-22T22:47:25.000Z
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: business models, Journalism, pando, paywalls, publishing strategy

Pando, occasional [unapologetic copyright thieves](http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2015/06/pando-copyright-abuse.html?ref=onemanandhisblog.com), have decided to [erect a paywall](https://pando.com/2015/06/22/welcome-new-pando/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com):

> 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.