Categories
News

Variety knocks down paywall

Well this one sneaked under my radar. A couple of days ago trade industry bible Variety announced that it is now fully available to all users.

In a press release they said:

Today, Variety, the leading global entertainment industry news source, announced that all of its award-winning editorial and advertising content on Variety.com is now available for free and without registration. Variety also launched its first electronic edition of Daily Variety – Digital Variety. Digital Variety will be available by subscription through Variety.com and access will be bundled with print subscriptions to Daily Variety and Weekly Variety.

โ€œWe chose the open web site access because of our exceptional growth in unique traffic. In the past year our monthly unique users have exponentially grown to over 2.4 million and after the Variety.com re-launch, we decided to keep the site free to continue to drive that growth,โ€ said Charlie Koones, President and Publisher, Variety. โ€œAdditionally, weโ€™ve launched the digital edition for our entertainment and media professionals worldwide who demand convenient, reliable and timely access to Daily Variety.โ€

This can only be a good move. It will inevitably lead to more users and better ad revenues on the site, although how it will affect the print edition remains to be seen.

> PaidContent on the newsย (Thanks to Matt for the link)
> The original press release at Business Wire