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1. Amy makes the point that users don’t like to divulge their personal information for “something as negligible as the right to read an article”. This touches on a key point in this debate for me. Is the right to read content on your site a big deal in your users lives? If it is, registration could be an option. However, if your content is not exclusive and/or compelling, and a similar experience is offered by competitors, then obviously the registration model makes much less sense.

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   1. Liam Gibbs on August 29th, 2005 at 3:07 am

2. I’d like to draw a distinction between the two models you included in this piece - forced registration and paid archives.

   As someone who came from the newspaper world and worked for five years at a newspaper-owned portal, I believe the forced registration model is a result of the newspaper mindset. They want to show advertisers information about their demographic (especially when they bundle online and print ads, since papers have no accurate demo data), and they believe the value they get out of users telling them their age, how much they make, how often the buy the paper, etc. is higher than the value of an unregistered pageview. I believe that’s shortsighted and a losing model in the open Internet world, but that’s what’s going on.

   Paid archives, however, are a different matter. Typically, if you’re looking for a newspaper piece that’s more than a year old, you’re researching, not looking for news (”news” simply being the plural of “new”). There’s real value associated with archived information, and therefore a real cost to be expected. Newspapers have always had profitable archive businesses, they’ve just not been online until recently (and most still aren’t). The old business model was that you went to the newspaper office or called them and a librarian would do the research for you - for a fee. And most newspaper stories created before 1985-90 (depending on when the paper switched to modern computers) doesn’t exist in a digital format. So there are actual hard costs involved in creating a digital archive. This is why you’ll see a lot of papers start with recent years and over time their archives will go back farther.

   Now, is 14 days old considered “archive”? Some papers say yes, some say no.

   But I don’t think it’s fair to lump the two things together.

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   2. Ken Zon on August 26th, 2005 at 8:52 pm

3. It’s the paper. Literally. I was talking to a savvy working journalist about this a couple of days ago, and we had much of this same discussion about the paid archives part. He’s employed by a daily newspaper with paid archives.

   What he’s been told is that subscriptions and circulation went down when the archive was free. That’s stopped and there is some circulation gain again (small) since they instituted the paid archives.

   To the business office, that makes a paid archive a no brainer. I still think it’s a mistake (see the long “cash cow” discussion at Buzzmachine), but for dollars and cents apparently the argument is compelling.

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   3. Greg Burton on August 26th, 2005 at 8:29 pm

4. Howard Owens wrote: “There is no demonstrated downside to forced registration for local news sites. If I ever see hard data that says forced registration is hurting my site, I’ll change tactics, but so far all of the hard data supports forced registration.”

   OK, since he’s the only reader so far who has spoken in favor of forced registration, I’ll take up that point now.

   First of all, I’m not trying to say that the news professionals who favor forced registration are entirely in the wrong; nor am I saying that people who favor unfettered access to news content are completely right. I am saying that I think it would be helpful for all of us if we really tried to listen to and understand each other’s views, rather than immediately retreat into polarization.

   As far as I understand Howard, he’s right in that there is data to support that news organizations can earn revenue through requiring registration and by charging for access to archives. I’m not disputing that.

   It just seems to me that, based on what online venues and services outside the news industry are doing, registration and paid archives don’t seem to be necessary in order to make money from content online; whether through advertising or other models.

   That alone makes me think that people who work at forced-registration, paid-archive news sites are working from a different set of business assumptions about online media than the most of the other types of online venues and services. I think it’s worth examining what those assumptions are, so we could better determine whether news organizations really are a special case where forced registration and paid archives make the most business sense.

   Which is why I posted this article in the first place. Obviously, I’m missing something major about how the people who make these decisions within news organizations think. I’m still hoping someone can shed some light on that particular point, because I think that might hold the key to better communication and mutual understanding — prerequisites for any kind of positive change.

   I was intrigued by the forthcoming Pew study Steve Outing mentioned. Depending on the details of how it’s focused and conducted, that could be very useful indeed — at least for people who rely primarily on statistics to make decisions.

   I’m glad that some proponents of no/voluntary registration and/or free archives spoke up here, because they articulated their perspectives well and explained their reasoning. That’s a helpful part of the process too. Still, basically saying “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s why,” (a vast oversimplification, I admit) is unlikely to engage or persuade folks who don’t already agree with that perspective.

   Obviously, something about how the two camps on this issue are communication isn’t working, because it seems we’re only getting more entrenched and polarized. I’d like to see that change.

   - Amy Gahran
   Editor, Contentious

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   4. Amy Gahran on August 26th, 2005 at 4:47 pm

5. Media person 1: “How can we solve the problem of declining readership?”

   Media person 2: “Let’s hide our content from people and make them sign up for accounts!”

   To all the other misguided registration proponents:

   (Whoops, “misguided” was redundant.)

   If it’s a good idea, why haven’t we seen other Web industries do it?

   Why haven’t we seen Google require a login in order to perform a search?

   Why haven’t we seen Amazon.com require a login in order to browse the product catalog?

   Why haven’t we seen eBay require a login in order to view auctions?

   The answer is because those other industries/sites actually get it. Requiring a login only makes sense when NOT requiring a login DOESN’T make sense.

   Google requires a login for its GMail product, because if GMail accounts didn’t require logins, anybody could read anybody else’s e-mail.

   Amazon.com requires a login for posting reviews, because if it didn’t require logins, the site would be overcome with phony, and spam, reviews.

   eBay requires a login for bidding in an auction, because if it didn’t require logins, people couldn’t accumulate feedback, which would collapse the whole trust system.

   Why does it make sense for a reader to log in to a newspaper site?

   “Because they get the Honor Of Reading A News Story” doesn’t cut it. That answer is ludicrous and arrogant.

   There is no good answer. Nothing about the experience of reading a news story fundamentally requires that a person be tied to a registration account. Forced registration on news sites is purely for media companies’ benefit.

   I hope news sites realize this before Google, Yahoo and independent local Web sites walk all over them.

   Speaking only for myself,
   Adrian

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   5. Adrian Holovaty on August 26th, 2005 at 3:10 pm

6. As the editor in chief of a profitable, online, ad-supported site, I love the fact that so many others are walling themselves off behind registration walls. I have shed the dead-trees mindset that says readers are only interested new stories, and try from the start to create stories mindful of their potential for long life. If you create good metatags, readers will flock directly to the stories germane to their interests, today, tomorrow and a year from now. Amy, quit teaching those other guys that which is obvious to me. You’ll ruin me!

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   6. Daniel P. Ray on August 26th, 2005 at 2:51 pm

7. Howard: For the record, I didn’t bring this topic up again; the Future Tense people called me wanting to hear my views on this, then Amy decided that was worth a blog item. You and I have gone back and forth on this publicly and privately, so there’s no new ground broken here.

   Sometime soon there should be a Pew study released on this very topic. (I’d thought this summer, but it seems to be taking longer.) Then we’ll have some real data to go on — and either you can think about changing tactics or I’ll eat some crow. 8^)

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   7. Steve Outing on August 26th, 2005 at 1:06 pm

8. Ms. Gahran’s right, at least from my experience. I get most, if not all of my news through my RSS reader. When I see (Reg Req’d) next to an item, I automatically ignore it. Consider this: I have three AP feeds. Most of them come up on thejournalnews.com, the Web site of a newspaper somewhere in New York, because that site doen’t require registration, or my personal data, to give me the information that I could get anywhere. But, the point is, I’m not getting it from anywhere, I’m getting it from their site. I’d shudder to guess how many ads I’ve seen on their site in the last few months. Isn’t “eyeballs on ads” the name of the game now? Hasn’t it always been?

   Consider this, as well: I used to work for an NYT owned newspaper. Did that compell me to give my personal information to nyt.com when I wanted to read something there? Um, no. I went to bugmenot just like everyone else.

   Point being: My personal information is, well, my personal information, and I don’t want it in a hundred databases out there. That’s because I know that, for every database I’m in, I somehow end up with a hundred pieces of junk mail, virtual and/or snail.

   Another example: I joined NAHJ. I won’t make that mistake again. They sold my name (mispelled) to everyone and their halfwit cousin with a flier to mail or a magazine subsciption to sell or a credit card to hype. In the days of databases, data is holy. I won’t pass it out just to read a news article that I can (usually) get elsewhere.

   I respect Mr. Owen’s point of view, but I know a lot of people who just click to another news site when presented with a registration screen. News has been ad supported for a long time. Surely news execs can figure out how to be ad supported on the Web.

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   8. Jeremy A. Verdusco on August 26th, 2005 at 1:02 pm

9. I really don’t understand why you and Steve keep hammering away at force registration as if there is a problem here.

   Your opposition to forced registration is based on some false assumptions that are demonstratably false, such as that a lot of people will give false information, that a lot of people are hesitant to give out personal information, and that a lot of people will use bugmenot and similar services. I don’t know one site manager who runs a forced-registration site who agrees with those assumptions.

   There is also an assumption that every link into a local news site is valuable. In fact, the opposite is true. Some links cost more than they’ll ever produce in revenue.

   You say you don’t understand the POV of site managers who support forced registration, yet there’s nothing new in what I’m saying here. It’s very simple – there is no demonstrated downside to forced registration for local news sites.

   If I ever see hard data that says forced registration is hurting my site, I’ll change tactics, but so far all of the hard data supports forced registration.

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   9. Howard Owens on August 26th, 2005 at 11:46 am