
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.
Sign up for e-mail updates
Join the newsletter to receive the latest posts in your inbox.
Some Good Reading About The Future of News Paid Members Public
Good stuff I’ve read recently, haven’t linked to yet, but don’t have much to add to right now: * The Nichepaper Manifesto [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/07/the_nichepaper_manifesto.html] – an articulate and well argued guide to how niche publishing might looks going forwards. * Media