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Simon Willison’s Weblog

News site registration

The single hottest topic in the online news industry at the moment is that of required registration. A number of large news sites (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune) have moved to this model, and many local newspapers are following suit.

If you haven’t seen BugMeNot, go and check it out now. It’s a simple service for sharing free news site accounts, and it’s started to upset some people in the news industry. A post to the online-news mailing list inquiring about possible legal action against the site prompted me to reply with the following:

The flaw here is not with BugMeNot— it’s with the entire concept of user registration in its present form. The reason BugMeNot works is that there is absolutely no value to an end user in keeping their account to themselves. If you want to stop people from sharing their accounts, give them an incentive not to. This is not a difficult thing to do—I have a large number of accounts on different community sites which are used to contribute to discussions and manage my personal information. I would never dream of sharing those accounts with others - it would allow other people to impersonate me and damage my reputation. An account that only allows me to read content (a one-way interaction) is of no value to me, so why not share the account with others?

BugMeNot is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination: shared accounts have existed for as long as sites have required registration for spurious reasons. For as long as I can remember, members of the MetaFilter community have worked together to set up username/password combinations of metafilter/metafilter on sites that require registration to bypass the irritation of setting up yet another account.

If you want to fight BugMeNot, the solution is to monitor the site and ban any accounts for your own site that appear there—but that’s just fighting the symptoms. The core problem is the whole idea of registration itself: it’s anti-web, anti-user, it doesn’t scale and it’s a sign of extreme short term thinking. Imagine if every site on the web required registration—no one would use it!

As a web user, I see registration as nothing more than an unnecessary irritation. Before BugMeNot I would simply hit “Back” whenever I saw a registration screen; now I use it to carry on through to the articles and accompanying ads. As a heavy web user who buys online almost as frequently as offline I’m exactly the kind of demographic sites should be trying to attract.

Reading the above a few days later, I think it still accurately represents my thoughts on the free registration model.

Adrian has also posted his thoughts on registration, which run along very similar lines to mine.

For a great example of the mentality behind registration, check out this spiel from the Toronto Star (via Craig Saila):

Our main goal of asking you to become a registered member of thestar.com is to improve and enhance your online experience with us. Registration is an important piece of our long-term strategy in building a valuable audience for our advertisers and helping us in setting the priorities for future site development and enhancements.

[...]

By asking you to share some information with us we are able to increase the value of our site to advertisers, who help support the cost of producing one of Canada’s top news sites, by offering them the ability to target their advertising messages based on the information you provide.

And that’s the problem right there: as a user, the value proposition of having more targetted ads thrown at me just isn’t a good enough incentive for me to jump through their hoops.

Posted 16th July 2004 at 4:16 pm

This is News site registration by Simon Willison, posted on 16th July 2004.

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21 comments

  1. If I look inside my wallet I see all kinds of plastic cards. Car insurance, car roadside assistance, health insurance, credit cards, grocery store "valued customer" cards, and so forth. It's quite a stack. I hate it. Everybody wants me to "sign up" with them.

    I think news site registration is repelling along the same lines because (1) people are sick of giving away their email addresses and getting even more spam (legit and illegit); and (2) who wants to remember yet another password? I do agree with the statement that it is short-term thinking.

    Milan Negovan - 16th July 2004 17:15 - #

  2. Simon, Both this post and Milan's comment remind of this Wired article from last year on Safeway's club card. Same concept: registration for one-way content (monetary discounts, in Safeway's case), but with little incentive for actually owning your own account. Again, as with so much on the web, it's a case of brick and mortar business practices being misapplied to the web.

    Kris - 16th July 2004 18:19 - #

  3. Hmm, so apparently having to sign up does offer additional value. According to the Toronto Star spiel, they would not be able to convince their advertizers that they have a large enough audience to keep them paying the big bucks. Therefore the articles would no longer be available to read at no monetary cost.

    Lets see. If we factor in all the people (like you and me) that turn away as soon as they see the registation requirement and all those that forget passwords and such, I would think their readership would grow without such silliness. But maybe that's just me.

    waylman - 16th July 2004 18:28 - #

  4. waylman, the point of registration isn't proving the size of your audience; simply analyzing log files will do that.

    They're wanting to provide audience demographics so that advertisers are attracted by market matching.

    Basically, the newspaper industry has always had audience metrics based on subscriptions, and they carry that expectation online. But of course their site isn't delivered to your door when you pay the bill. Simon's right on here.

    Jeremy Dunck - 16th July 2004 19:40 - #

  5. I registered with the New York Times a long time ago because I (generally) value their content and visit their site frequently. I didn't mind that. But now, so many small city newspapers are going with registration, and I think it drives away potential traffic. I come across links to apparently good articles from sites like Cursor.org or other media watch sites, but registration for just a one-off article is just not worth it. It's another name / password I have to keep track of, but I haven't been given a reason yet to go through the annoyance, since the article is beyond my grasp. I have no way of judging the quality of that paper's writing beyond the fact that I may have caught a good referral to it. Are the smaller city papers just expecting to serve their home area demographic?

    J.Shell - 16th July 2004 20:18 - #

  6. I absolutely agree with you, Simon. And I too just turn on my heel when I hit that registration page. Haven't looked into Bug Me Not yet, but I will next time I can't see an article (which 99 times out of 100 I'm coming to because someone linked to it - and how dumb is it for these guys to be turning away readers they got through FREE advertising?)

    Dinah Sanders - 16th July 2004 20:49 - #

  7. Something that particularly annoys me is when I click-thru a Google News (http://news.google.com/) link only to find I'd have to register at the resulting site in order to read the article whose introduction had piqued my interest.

    Lewis Henshall - 17th July 2004 04:45 - #

  8. I went to the trouble to register at NY Times, Washington Post, and a few others. Nevertheless, most of the time when I click on one of their links and reach a login prompt, I just hit the "back" button. Even looking up a password on BugMeNot is too much trouble.

    I'm sorry, guys, but there are lots of your competitors (CNN, MSNBC, AP, the BBC, and thousands more) that give me instant gratification when I click a link, and frankly, I haven't been given any evidence that your publications are more uniquely worthy of my extra time, attention, and compromised privacy than all of the rest.

    CNN has the right idea. People can volunteer to become members, and when they do, they answer some demographic questions. The members get added value for registering (like emailed news alerts or sports scores) and CNN gets a nice sample of their entire audience demographics to show their advertisers. Open access gives them a much wider reach, which the advertisers should like, and gets their content listed in search engines like a real citizen of the Web.

    I don't see the downside.

    Michael Moncur - 17th July 2004 10:26 - #

  9. As the operator of bugmenot I can't tell you how good it is to see some dialogue on all this. A very, very strong case against collecting demographics via forced registration is that you simply can't verify the collected data. I'd compel anyone to prove me wrong on this point. So essentially newspaper sites are deliberately flogging dud data to their advertisers at the cost of our time.

    bugmenot.com - 17th July 2004 12:02 - #

  10. I have this "friend" who registers anytime it's required with (A) a completely temporary email address (B) the zip code "90210" and (C) other such false information. It's ALL false, and I know he's not the only one doing it. So how much of their data is totally erroneous? And they're going up to advertisers with this wormy data on a silken pillow? "Your majesty ... the DEMOGRAPHICS!"

    Cardhouse - 17th July 2004 16:26 - #

  11. I'm the design director of a medium sized newspaper Website. We currently have optional registration and don't understand the sites that make registration mandatory. We have discussed going that route, but we wouldn't make it required until a reader reads 3 articles in a day. That way you can still get the registration data from your main users, but you don't cut off the occasional user who may come in from Google News.

    Quirked - 17th July 2004 17:18 - #

  12. I'd like to mention that Firefox has an extension for BugMeNot that is quite convenient. Merely right-click somewhere on the registration page and select BugMeNot, and a popup window will appear with the username and password if it's in BugMeNot's database.

    I dislike the general trend towards collecting data on all users. I do register for the sites I enjoy and regularly use (and I click on their ads), but if it is the first time visiting, a required registration used to always send me away.

    caiuschen - 17th July 2004 18:00 - #

  13. Another Firefox extension I use, AdBlock, defeats the whole purpose of registration: I never get to see the ads...

    Ben - 17th July 2004 21:48 - #

  14. I always use the extension for BugMeNot, when there is no login available, I create a fake account and post it to BugMeNot.

    stombi - 20th July 2004 09:15 - #

  15. (this whole comment can be summed up in: why don't news organizations treat their online readers the way amazon treats its customers?)

    Why don't news organizations use context sensitive ads? Or they could look at the kinds of articles you read and give you advertisements based on that. This could be as simple as confining mortgage ads to real estate sections or as sophisticated as "this cookie only reads the op-eds and articles from the washington section but it never reads william safire, give it democratic political ads" (using the NYT as an example).

    This would provide them with higher quality, real-world data. But it's harder to do and it introduces potential privacy issues. But the registration for that is nothing more then login and password. No email or demographic information is required. It could even be a click-through "do you agree to be tracked" license.

    I don't understand why the inconvenient, spoofed and consequently worthless demographic information is collected at all at time of registration. They have much better reader-preference data available to them (and their advertisers).

    Ola - 20th July 2004 14:56 - #

  16. I hate it and will just click off ANY site that requires registration. Just another trick to get your info and sell it to the highest bidder.

    humidor - 29th July 2004 06:43 - #

  17. Have a look at http://www.bugmenot.com/

    Lewis Henshall - 5th September 2004 04:57 - #

  18. Ignore me. lol

    Lewis Henshall - 5th September 2004 05:00 - #

  19. is bugmenot even legal?

    jtull89 - 25th September 2004 19:23 - #

  20. I like football

    zakir - 18th March 2006 14:26 - #

  21. I like football

    zakir - 18th March 2006 14:26 - #

Comments are closed.

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