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Kim Kardashian's website relaunched some time in the night. The debut of its new look coincides with the not entirely positive hype around her husband's New York Fashion Week Show, which is scheduled for Wednesday of this week. To be sure, the launch date was a highly orchestrated touch, considering part of the site rebrand includes sticking her married name on the end of the URL.
The main page asks for login credentials: an email, password, and credit card information. The pop-up explains that the first seven days are free, and after that, a monthly charge of $2.99 will keep its users in Kardashian content.
The paywall fee, affordable but always a questionable move when there's so much for free on YouTube, will get you beauty tutorials, app access, live streams, and Kardasho-Jenner-focused blog content. Right now, that covers "the truth" about Kim's "pregnancy style," and tips on getting North's look, which is dubbed "NYC edge." One of the first "get the look" galleries links to incredibly affordable clothes. The biggest ticket item is a $117 Nina Kymari over-the-knee boot, which stands in for a pair of $1,995 Gianvito Rossi boots. She's clearly thinking about the majority of her fans here.
Right now, the beauty tutorials, the reason anyone is here really, feature contouring lesson and strobing lessons. Put "strobing makeup tutorial" in YouTube and you get well over 45,000 hits. Put "contouring makeup tutorial" and you get about 217,000 hits. Put "Kim Kardashian contouring makeup tutorial" and you have over 90,000 hits. This information — which Kim neither invented nor perfected, but instead made unprecedentedly famous — is widely available. Users are quite transparently paying for fame, guaranteed quality, and maybe time saved sifting through videos. Will her fans pay? According to Arabelle Sicardi for Racked, Kardashian diehards as well as your everyday "beauty hobbyists" flew to LA and paid for a $300 ticket to be in the same room as Kim and her makeup. There's a good chance these fans will find the $2.99 a month to continue the lesson.