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Turning Up The Heat On On-Line Registration
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "CNN is running a story on the growing number of print newspapers with on-line editions that are requiring registration. Apparently there are some folks out there who don't like this 'feature'! I found a few things interesting about the story: Privacy groups say it's a dangerous practice and promotes spam; I didn't realize people put real personal info into these things (110-year-old surgeons from Bulgaria named Mickey Mouse). About 15 to 20 percent of the registrations for the Philadelphia Inquirer turned out to be bogus, a figure that was much lower than I would have thought. Also mentioned in the story is a web site called BugMeNot.com, which lists 'communal' logins and passwords for on-line newspapers."
The day the online LA Times started requiring subscriptions... ...I stopped reading the LA Times online.
...I stopped reading the Washington Post online.
The day the online Washington Post started requiring subscriptions...
Luckily, the NYTimes didn't require a valid email, once upon a time...
There are still enough free sources of news on the Internet-- if some papers want to cut down on their advertising exposure and online circulation, fine. Screw 'em. There is no reason they need my name to send me their news and ads.
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Works on quite a few sites.
When the latest movie hits the cinemas, you have to pay $10 to $15 (depending on currency) per viewing. If you're prepared to wait six months, you can rent it for $5 and view it a couple of times. If you wait a year, you can get it as a weekly video for less. If you're prepared to wait a couple of years, you can see that same movie for free when it is on TV.
The longer you're prepared to wait, the less it costs.
Newspapers should do the same thing. Keep the online edition free, and have no soul-sucking registration to view, but only allow the viewing of articles from non-current newspapers. The online edition would then become a free archive service. People who want today's news can buy today's newspaper, or wait a day or two when it's posted online.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I was a bit disappointed with the bugmenot-feature. I tought it would bring me right onto the site in some form of frame so I could be ready to surf right away. Now I have to type the newspaper URL atleast twice, copy/pate'ing the user/password.
Make it a frame, parse some HTML to allow one-click-login, add a banner to finance the bandwidth, and you should be all set.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
ie, my amazon account is registered to amazon@domain.co.uk and my slashdot account is registered to slashdot@domain.co.uk
Anyone who decides to spam me or give out or sell my email address will be found.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Google apparently cuts deals with sites so that Google's crawler can read them, while others can't. Those sites show as "(subscription)" in Google News. If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
A mozilla/firefox plugin that checked against an autogenerated file from their site could be a fun project sometime too.
Everything will be taken away from you.
http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html
Ow. I'd hate to see their mail inboxes.
I think it is great that different newspapers try different things. It gives us a chance to see what works and what fails.
It seems to me that newspapers lose more for requiring registration than they get from that little bit of demographic information.
Newspapers that require registration end up losing boat loads of traffic from search engines and they tend to lose the valuable backward links for article citations in blogs and what not.
In the long run, of course, the most successful format for online news would be the hybrid model that gives some features for paying, others for free registration and has a good amount of info available for free to build and maintain casual web traffic.
I'll never understand the business model of a newspaper that puts its articles on their website. How the heck do they expect to make money from this? Cause its not from people clicking on their 2"x1" Tiffany's ad or from the inevitable spam people get when they like, actually use their real info when registering.
For instance, they might show ridiculously ad-ridden pages (with a 2 minute DHTML/flash/full screen "click to continue to article" ads) for those with bogus registrations (based on a bad email address). They could do anything from showing non-updated (day old) news or, at worst, add "not" after every "was" or "had" and completely throw the reader for a loop. Of course in the last case, they'd probably need to modify their logo/title to show that it was no longer their newspaper to maintain their credibility.
The technology to do this is trivial. If the day comes when a falsely-registered user is worth less to the site (because of advertiser's refusals to pay) than non-readers, I could very well see this happening.
Why does online registration offend, but not offline?
Why so much angst about online newspaper reigstration when we've been providing the same information to the same newspapers for years when we get a paid subsription to the dead-tree version?
The same info gets collected and entered into the paper's databases.
Why is providing a (real) name and address so someone can deliver your subscription not a privacy issue, but everyone gets hysterical about keying the same info into on web form?
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