User Registration Need Not Be Inevitable Forcing Web visitors to register is a major trend among newspapers, but is it the only alternative?
By
Steve Outing
(June 23, 2004) -- The newspaper industry -- even more so than other sectors of the media -- continues to march forward on user registration at its Web sites. Nearly every week, I receive notice of another newspaper site having converted to required registration for visitors.
While there are lots of good reasons to register users -- and, personally, I buy many of them -- this shouldn't be a slam-dunk for newspapers. There are equally good reasons to eschew registration, or to use it in different ways.
There may be reasons to entice users to give up personal information without demanding it from them. And a case can be made for going against the wave and rejecting registration outright. What's right for your site?
Serving the user, not just yourself
Perhaps the most common justification for forced user-registration is that it allows managers to monetize (to use the hackneyed phrase from the dot-com boom days) visitors by better targeting advertisements -- Web and e-mail -- based on users' submitted personal data. The rationale typically goes like this: "Visitors to our site need to pay us for what we produce in order for us to stay in business, and we think required registration data -- rather than cash payment -- is a reasonable price for them to pay."
But notice that the benefits are mostly to the news site, not the reader. Yes, better targeted ads can be seen as a (modest) user benefit, but the required-registration equation is mostly weighted toward the publisher.
Think about it from the user perspective. Sites requiring registration in order to see their content are annoying to part of the audience. Click on a story from a home page and your quest is interrupted by a demand to fill out a form. True, many people will comply. But you've annoyed many others, and some visitors will simply avoid your site and go elsewhere for comparable information and news (especially those referred by search engines and blogs). Wouldn't it be better to make the situation a win-win for both site and user?
But how to reconcile your site's need to make money with visitors' desires for the best online experience -- in a competitive environment where in an instant they can flit off to another site?
Just don't do it!
Adrian Holovaty, lead Web developer for the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and editor of a news-technology Web log, Holovaty.com, thinks he has a better idea: In a nutshell, don't require users to register, period.
His company's sites, ljworld.com, KUSports.com and Lawrence.com, allow unfettered access to all content -- as was the norm among most news sites until the last few years.
But that doesn't mean the Journal-World sites reject user registration. Rather, it's required only in limited instances where a user's identity is critical to a site function. For example, content on the sites -- from articles to event listings -- carry "Discuss This" links where visitors can offer feedback, post their own reviews, even upload their own photos to accompany editorial content. In order to post something, a user must register. Holovaty says that his approach is to create features that "are so cool" that people want to register to use them.
That distinction between requiring and enticing is perhaps best exemplified by Google. The search giant's success can be explained in part by how it offers (very) useful services to the Web community for free, supported by advertising -- that is, for services where user registration isn't necessary to fulfill the service. Google also offers additional tools that do require registration -- because they wouldn't be possible without it: an e-mail service, Gmail, for instance.
The news industry would be better served by taking this approach, Holovaty suggests. If your goal is to collect personal information from your users, entice them to do so by various methods -- from creating those additional "cool" services that require registration, to offering incentives to voluntarily register. The Web site of The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia is giving voluntary registrants the chance to win $30,000.
It might take longer to amass an adequate number of registered visitors through the voluntary route than via forced registration, but Holovaty urges news organizations to think for the long term, not the short. Requiring users to register in order to view your site's content might give you a short-term gain, but for the long term you'll probably be shooting yourself in the foot, he says.
Evidence of that comes from Jupiter Research, which reported recently that forced-registration sites typically must deal with a significant chunk of falsified data from registrants. The study found that these sites as a whole have a 10%-20% bounce-back rate -- e-mails sent to abandoned, falsified or non-working addresses submitted during user registration. Forced registration encourages some people -- apparently a sizable percentage -- to falsify their information. Many managers at forced-registration sites say they expect some false addresses in the registration pool, and they simply have to accept and deal with that. But voluntary registration should lessen the bogus registration data considerably.
Short-term passes: Bait and switch?
A registration scheme that's increasingly popular is the threshhold pass. When a new visitor comes to a news site -- say, from an article link found on a blog or a search engine -- the article page may be served without a registration wall. Some sites allow several pages to be viewed by a non-registered visitor before a required-registration screen pops up. Others adjust the threshold based on news events -- turning off registration temporarily during a big breaking news event.
I wish every news site would employ this approach. It prevents people who find an article via an external source, such as Google, from immediately hitting a registration roadblock -- and in many instances, not bothering to register anyway.
But Holovaty find this approach flawed, too. "That's admirable," he says, but "in a way it's almost a bait and switch. I think I might be more angry" to click around a site, then after a few clicks be hit up for personal data. The casual visitor is still a casual visitor -- not a potential regular user -- if he clicks around to four or five stories on a news site during a one-time visit.
And no matter how many times you let people in for "free" before hitting them with a registration demand, you're still inconveniencing bloggers and those who routinely want to link to your content. In aggregate, bloggers linking to you are a powerful marketing force working on your behalf. Required registration mucks that up.
An alternative: Metadata
One reason that so many news sites are gravitating toward registration is the powerful lure of targeted contextual advertising. Companies such as Tacoda, Revenue Science and AlmondNet support behavioral targeting, which they can combine with a site's registration data to serve up very specific ads based on a user's interests and background. For instance, by combining behavioral site-usage tracking and personal data, a site might show different ads alongside uplifting religion stories, with elderly readers seeing one ad and young adults with school-age children seeing another, says Tacoda Systems CEO Dave Morgan.
That's powerful stuff, at least in theory. Can a Web site that doesn't require registration even hope to have the same potential financial success?
Holovaty thinks he has a non-registration solution that will support both effective targeting of advertising and better editorial service for users. In a word, it's meta-data.
At the Journal-World sites, Holovaty envisions a new content management system (due to be deployed later this summer) that allows reporters and editors to input meta-data information into content. That means that as a reporter produces a story, he would tag it with information about the story -- or, more likely, a copy editor/producer would do it prior to publication. Every site already does that at the most basic level -- this is a News, Business, Sports or Features article, for instance -- "but we need to move way beyond that," Holovaty argues.
Useful meta-data attached to stories might include: neighborhood; people cited; groups or organizations included in the story; tone of the story (serious, humorous, light, upbeat, depressing, etc.); topic/subtopic; etc.
Now take that meta-data and deploy it. Holovaty and his co-horts at the Journal-World currently are thinking mostly in terms of editorial enhancements powered by this meta-data. For example, site visitors might be able to view stories with any attributes (e.g., uplifting stories about young people). They could sign up for a feed of future articles/content about little-league baseball in their town. The possibilities are considerable. Says Holovaty, "Once we have that meta-data info, it's a gold mine" for creating better, more personal editorial services -- and for enhancing advertising.
A meta-data-powered news site can serve to combat the likes of Google coming into local markets. Google already has exhibited phenomenal success in attracting ad dollars (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year -- with some of that coming from local advertisers who otherwise might have spent with local media) to its AdWords and AdSense programs, which place contextual text ads next to Google search results and on partner content sites, respectively. As Google advances that concept into Google Local, with services that directly compete with what local news organizations try to do online, the threat to local newspapers is real.
But with a meta-data approach, local publishers can serve up their own contextual-advertising experience.
The San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate.com recently launched a text-ad program called OnSale, which for a low fee ($199 for seven days) puts text ads alongside articles throughout the site. OnSale currently doesn't have a contextual component, but if the site used a meta-data approach with OnSale, it could be a competitor with Google's contextual ads.
How deep do you need to go?
Could meta-data-driven advertising keep a news Web site afloat financially? There's no one-size-fits-all answer, but it does enhance the typical site's advertising program without introducing the annoyances of forced registration.
Tacoda's Morgan says that "meta-data-targeted contextual advertising will certainly be a big part of the future of online media, as long as it is efficient and simple -- a la Google. However, it will always be more valuable to enhance that targeting with audience information" from sites' user-registration databases.
If you are an advertiser wanting to sell dog food, says Morgan, "Why would you want to pay for messages to people who don't own a dog?" Relying strictly on behavior tracking or strictly on meta-data to place contextual ads alongside editorial content probably isn't going to identify dog owners, but depending on how deep you go with registration and other databases of personal information, you might be able to identify them that way.
In covering the online-news business lately, I've clearly noticed a herd mentality when it comes to forced registration. And unfortunately, I've noticed some less-than-ideal registration models (like requiring users to register even to view classifieds, an approach taken by some McClatchy sites such as StarTribune.com). Let's give more attention to the voluntary-registration model. I'd like to see Holovaty's meta-data model deployed to more directly address the coming Google Local threat.
At least some of your colleagues are not joining the herd. Holovaty's boss, Journal-World New Media Director Rob Curley, is holding off on registration for now. Why? He doesn't want to annoy his readers. But he's not as adamant in his convictions as is Holovaty. Says Curley, "Even though I don't want (forced) user registration now, I'll never say never."
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Steve Outing
(steve@poynter.org)
has covered the online news industry for E&P since August 1995. He is senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.
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