Poynter Institute just published a fun memory-lane article on homepages of yore –– or more specifically 1994. It made me remember the old Netflix homepage style, back when a million paying subscribers was an aggressive dream, let alone today’s 23.6 million.As seen via the Internet Wayback machine, in January 1999 Netflix’s home looked a lot like an ecommerce site homepage now, with lots of headlines and images plugging various movies on offer.Most paywall news and magazine site homepages are also that way still, with lots of headlines plugging various content items on offer. They hope to show off their range and to get you to click on something that tickles your fancy, and only at that point they’ll slam down the paywall offer.In Internet marketing circles, Netflix has long been known to be doing A/B testing to improve their conversions. Any changes they’ve made on their homepage were dictated by conclusive test results. And, the change has been profound. Zero particular movies are plugged on the homepage now. There’s no news, no choice of headlines, almost no click paths beyond ‘ start now’ or ‘log-in.’  The homepage itself is the paywall, and as such is nearly wholly dedicated to converting you to accepting an offer for the service as a whole. You want a particular movie? Go elsewhere on the Internet. You want this subscription service? Come on inside.I like this approach, probably because it’s proven out here. And, I think every paywall site that can should test a radical redesign based on the same lines. You can split off your traffic so only a slice see the new homepage (easy with many testing tools on the market today ) Your homepage may work better promoting your overall brand value proposition … instead of lots of snippets of your content. Features vs benefits, in old-time copywriter lingo.