
Show HN: Vanity Fair, the Future, and You - mankins
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2018/04/radhika-jones-digital-subscription
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mankins
My team at Vanity Fair launched a paywall today. Any comments/suggestions?

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troydavis
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?

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mankins
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.

Thanks for the questions!

