Kris Turner

kris.turner@indystar.com

Angie’s List is dropping its paywall for customer reviews in an effort to foster profitability for the struggling home-service review provider.

The Indianapolis-based company, which made the announcement today to shareholders, said it will offer three tiers of service to customers. The first tier will be free.

Lowering the paywall for consumer reviews and offering premium services at a cost will help Angie’s List’s grow its profits, said Scott Durchslag, Angie’s List president and chief executive officer.

“We get over 100 million visitors to the site every year, but about 90 percent of them are bouncing off the paywall,” he said.

The paywall will be lowered some time this summer.

The web traffic generated by the additional visitors will be monetized by the company, which can use it to generate digital information for service providers.

“Our big challenge is to show revenue growth accelerating,” Durchslag said, adding that most millennial homeowners will not pay for consumer reviews.

Angie’s List recently recorded its first year of profitability, but its fourth-quarter earnings were disappointing to Wall Street.

Call IndyStar reporter Kris Turner at (317) 444-6047. Follow him on Twitter: @krisnturner.

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