Can you share anything about the business and technical considerations that went into it? Some stuff I’d be curious about:
- did you build or buy it? If build, what’s it written in and how did you choose?
- were micropayments considered and if so, how’d that debate go?
- does it intentionally permit requests from certain referring domains, and if so, how’d the team decide which ones?
- was any analysis or monitoring done to arrive at the page view limit (like “X% of visitors would have reached it”), or was it the team’s - or an individual’s - subjective assessment of what felt right?
This is Condé's third full-site paywall, following behind our implementations on The New Yorker and Wired. We also have a paywall for some specialty content at Golfdigest.com.
The Vanity Fair paywall is built in house, with some help from outside vendors for metering.
We make extensive use of our CDN (Fastly) and VCL. Our site is in React. The New Yorker makes heavy use of VCL whereas Vanity Fair reworked its implementation to do some things in the client and some at the edge.
I'd say this is the start of a monetization conversation, not the end. Micropayments certainly have promise, but the move from print subscriptions to print and digital subscriptions needs to play out first before the next iteration. Will that be micropayments? I wouldn't close that door, but think there are likely other first steps.
Much of the business logic from the paywall originates from our previous properties. This isn't to say that it's done, but that we used those as a starting point for this implementation.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 12.1 ms ] thread- did you build or buy it? If build, what’s it written in and how did you choose?
- were micropayments considered and if so, how’d that debate go?
- does it intentionally permit requests from certain referring domains, and if so, how’d the team decide which ones?
- was any analysis or monitoring done to arrive at the page view limit (like “X% of visitors would have reached it”), or was it the team’s - or an individual’s - subjective assessment of what felt right?
The Vanity Fair paywall is built in house, with some help from outside vendors for metering.
We make extensive use of our CDN (Fastly) and VCL. Our site is in React. The New Yorker makes heavy use of VCL whereas Vanity Fair reworked its implementation to do some things in the client and some at the edge.
I'd say this is the start of a monetization conversation, not the end. Micropayments certainly have promise, but the move from print subscriptions to print and digital subscriptions needs to play out first before the next iteration. Will that be micropayments? I wouldn't close that door, but think there are likely other first steps.
Much of the business logic from the paywall originates from our previous properties. This isn't to say that it's done, but that we used those as a starting point for this implementation.
Thanks for the questions!
-What were some of the hardest challenges of launching this feature?
-What do you think about BAT tokens https://basicattentiontoken.org/ possible future model for publishing?
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