Why [registration required] appears on some of our sources
from Wired

When Kelly Dyer first considered requiring readers of the Oklahoma news site NewsOK.com to fill out a form in exchange for access to articles, she had plenty of reservations. Chief among them: Users might object to submitting personal data, and traffic to the site would decline.

But, throwing caution to the wind, NewsOK went ahead with the registration plan last March, near the peak of the high-traffic college basketball season.

"We just kind of closed our eyes and jumped off a cliff, because we realized it was something we wanted to do," said Dyer, NewsOK's general manager. She said the decision stemmed in part from pressure from advertisers who wanted to know more about the site's readers before paying for online campaigns.

Nearly a year into the experiment, Dyer has few regrets. Registered users currently top 277,000, exceeding the weekday circulation of the site's parent newspaper, The Oklahoman. Only about one in 200 readers complained about registration. And NewsOK is optimistic about the potential for selling e-mail advertising to readers who said they are willing to receive messages.

Best of all, Dyer said, collecting data about readers means that the site "has a little more knowledge about who we're trying to reach."

While a few years ago only a handful of newspaper websites required user registration, industry analysts say the practice has now become commonplace. The bulk of the most widely circulated American papers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, require users to complete an online form to read articles. In recent weeks, The Washington Post joined the crowd, replacing a pop-up reader-questionnaire feature with a registration form requiring an e-mail address and password.

I read about 30 online newspapers per day for my job. It's a real pain, and I have Mozilla set cookies to expire at the end of every browser session, so it is even more annoying because I have to do it every day. Auto-form fill in helps, but I often find myself telling the newspapers that I am a 70 year-old woman from Texas. Hope it skews the numbers enough that this foolishness stops.

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Rob Runett, director of electronic communications for the Newspaper Association of America, says small and medium-sized papers are also following in the footsteps of the major dailies. To get access to articles, readers are increasingly required to provide such data as age, ZIP code, gender and, in many cases, information about income and personal interests.

The motive is a basic one. Newspapers want to make money from their websites. And since most readers are unwilling to pay for content in a world where online news is widely available for free, making money requires selling advertising.

To convince advertisers to spend online, newspapers say they need to get enough data about their users to tailor ads to the most receptive possible audience. Thus, it's necessary to have enough data about its audience to determine, say, how people live within driving distance of a particular store, or which readers would be most interested in offers from luxury-car dealers.

"It's a pretty small trade-off in exchange for all of our content," said Mike Coleman, senior manager of digital media at The Arizona Republic, which began requiring registration about four months ago.

To keep its readers from complaining too much, Coleman said, the paper decided to keep its online registration form short. Readers are required to provide only three pieces of information: age, gender and ZIP code.

Other papers have taken the opposite approach. At the Los Angeles Times, for example, new registrants must give their name, e-mail, address, birth year, phone number, gender and annual household income. DallasNews.com, the website of The Dallas Morning News, which has a similarly lengthy registration page, also asks readers about their hobbies and interests. The site says it is collecting the information to help sell more advertising and keep its content free.

Cox Newspapers, which publishes 17 daily and 25 weekly papers nationwide, waited until January to launch its first experiment in mandatory registration, at the Austin American-Statesman. This spring, the newspaper chain plans to begin requiring registration at five of its daily newspapers.

"Obviously (registration) is picking up and will be spreading around to many more newspapers in coming years," said John Reetz, director of CoxNet, Cox's online division. Although some readers may initially balk at registration, he expects fans of local news will go along with the request.

While most newspaper websites haven't seen a marked drop in traffic after instituting registration, a December report by the Newspaper Association of America noted that sites should be prepared to handle a tide of complaints and questions from readers following requests for their personal data.

The report cited the Chicago Tribune as a target of criticism for requiring readers to accept marketing promotions as a condition of registration. The paper's website provides no way to opt out of e-mail marketing sent by the Tribune, other than declining to register. Users can only opt out of receiving messages directly from advertisers.

Privacy was also a concern, particularly given the potential for newspapers to cross-reference information provided by readers with other commercial databases. The NAA report notes that on average, about eight people with the same birthday live in each ZIP code, giving a media company a reasonable chance of uniquely identifying an individual registrant.

Of course, sites are required to reveal what they plan to do with readers' information in their online privacy policies. And the NAA's Runett finds that data-collection plans often backfire on sites that ask for more information than readers are comfortable providing.

After all, there's no guarantee that the information readers submit is accurate. And the fact that registration databases are filled with phony names like "Mickey Mouse" indicates, Runett said, that readers are only so willing to trade personal information for free content.

posted by prof_booty | 03:38 PM