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More Newspapers Sending Readers Elsewhere Via Registrations
from the where-do-you-look-for-news? dept
These days, the online consumer has an awful lot of choices for online news. Assuming that your newspapers' site is so special that people will want to cough up all sorts of personal info in exchange for access is an increasingly risky bet - but more and more sites are taking it, believing (incorrectly) that by doing this they'll get better info for their advertisers. This is wrong, of course. First off, by putting up any barrier, they're scaring off a good number of potential readers who have plenty of other places they can go to get similar stories. As for the "more accurate data" they can use to pitch advertisers - most are finding that much of the registered data they get is dirty data, since users don't want to give up personal info just to read the news. So, they have a smaller audience and less accurate data on that audience. This doesn't seem likely to bring in any more money. In fact, it seems like a recipe for bringing fewer advertising dollars. Why are so many more sites rushing to do this?
Reader Comments
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As your dirty data link points out . . .
a few of us have figured out that simply putting anything in the required feilds and using a throw away email account will usually get you through.
Out of maybe 2 dozen sites I regularly visit maybe 12 or 14 actually have the correct data. If anyone looked closly at the "data" they'd see a lot of 80-100 year old ladies visit their sites pretty regularly. :-)
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Registration only online news
Yes, I always register as a character from a comic book or invent a name such as Dark Force, say I'm from a country such as Vanuatu.
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Just use a news aggregator
News aggregators such as Google news really make this site useless once they go to this register-first model. I love using Google news just to get a couple different view points on a story, but you can also use it to find the free articles on the same subject the register/pay sites are publishing.
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Why are so many more sites rushing to do this?
Why? Primarily to get the right to send email.
The lesser cause is the lowering of ad rates for generic banner ads on sites without registration-- advertisers pay next to nothing to advertise on "free" pages (generally only paying "conversion" fees for click-throughs that lead to a transaction). Free sites don't cover their own bandwidth costs.
Advertisers will pay a higher rate per click-through from targeted ads via demographics collected from registered users.
Now link a valid (confirmed opt-in) email address to the visitor, and send "solicited" emails with some news mixed in with the advertising content, and you have a profit center.
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