Website Analysis 2

https://variety.com/

Similar to ‘Vogue’, the ‘Variety’ magazine website maintains a monochromatic colour scheme in its house style, suggesting sophistication as well as simplicity. This slightly deviates from their magazines, which involve a range of colours in a unique, artistic arrangement - ‘Variety’ may have done this to ensure the magazines are extra special and exclusive, as well as to create an unassuming brand identity that intrigues their audience. This develops their cross-media synergy as diverse, ensuring the same content or style isn’t repeated on their digital and print products, encouraging audiences to use both available sources rather than one or the other, maximising their revenue in each branch of the company. At the very top of the homepage, there are 11 navigation tabs that relate to entertainment such as ‘films’, ‘tv’, and ‘music’, demonstrating that the primary target audience is divergent from the female, fashion-lover demographic of ‘Vogue’, as they instead aim their content at both genders of a wider age range (16-29 year olds) who are majorly interested in the arts and entertainment industry. The 11th navigation tab is in a dark pink, capitalised font, which reads ‘VIP+’, drawing the attention of users towards their premium subscription, utilising the juxtaposing colour to intrigue them, ensuring that they click on it out of curiosity, even if they don’t purchase the subscription. This immediately engages the audience to stay on the website, before they even see the main stories and images.

Below these navigation tabs is the logo of ‘Variety’ in black font, cohering to the the house style. To the right of this are ‘subscribe’ and ‘log in’ navigation tabs, luring the readers to become an official user of Variety, however when investigating this, the website says you can only have access to sign in if you are a paid member. This demonstrates that whilst there are no paywalls on the website articles, allowing entertainment for a demographic of any background, the magazines and premium content are exclusive to those willing to pay. To the left of the Variety logo, there are further navigation tabs that directly target an active audience, such as ‘got a tip?’, allowing users to send in suggestions or stories, as well as a search button and hamburger button, ensuring easy access to the desired content by giving the freedom to look up, or presenting the menu of various of categories relevant to the user.

Underneath the logo are four categories of articles, with the titles in bold, and a short description of the content underneath, in the same font used for the whole website. These pique the interest of users, providing popular suggestions of what to read. Below this, ‘Top Story’ is written in a small green font, alerting the users of the headlining news, with a quote (in bold) used as the title, and a large image underneath, captioned with the insight to the story, so readers would know whether they are interested or not. Beside this, there is a ‘most popular’ segment in bold, with a collection of stories listed in bold, with smaller images to the left of them, which mainly focus on the person (or people) involved.

When scrolling down, there are articles specific to film, music, gaming, etc, targeting the wider audience who may have particular or niche interests. Below this are ‘recommended for you’ articles, highlighting that Variety utilise user-data to specialise their content to individual consumers based on their browsing and ad history. Additional segments such as ‘latest news’, ‘awards’, ‘reviews’, ‘what to buy’, and ‘featured videos’ are included to demonstrate that Variety produces a wide range of content that covers all bases of the entertainment industry - their magazine is not specific to film or news, but instead includes content that every part of their audience can enjoy.

The images used are taken by Variety’s professional photographers, creating cinematic portraits that attract the eye of the of the users. They use a range of colours depending on the story, but their own in-house articles about their own events, such as ‘Actor on Actor’ feature bright colours and eccentric, yet chic fashion choices, producing an all-round fun. captivating, vivid aesthetic that warmly welcomes and intrigues their younger, artsy audience.