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NEW YORK It once was the Web bogeyman. The idea of making users register before entering newspaper Web sites gave everyone the willies. Surely this would lead to a huge drop in audience. Maybe The New York Times could survive that, and The Wall Street Journal could even charge for access, but those are very special cases.

Well, as it turns out, the bogeyman -- like Bigfoot -- should no longer be feared. It's nothing more than a phantom menace. According to an exclusive E&P survey, newspaper sites that built up registration walls last year have found that readers didn't leave in droves. In fact, several of these papers now have more online visitors than they had before requiring registration.

More important, these sites are already seeing new revenue as a result of registration, only a few months after they began to request demographic data from their users. "We've gone from zero dollars to seven figures in 2002 -- all from sponsored e-mail products" that require user registration, says Eric Christensen, vice president and general manager of Dallas-based Belo Interactive Inc., which began requiring full Web-site registration for the first time last year.

As word of this and similar successes spreads, more publishers are gearing up to build registration firewalls this year, including newspapers in the E.W. Scripps Co., McClatchy Co., Cox Enterprises Inc., Media General Inc., and Morris Communications Co. LLC chains. In most cases, the majority of the papers' content will remain free of charge, but users will be expected to pony up some personal information in exchange for the unfettered access. Some papers are sequestering most editorial content in a registration-only area, leaving classifieds and shopping sections open to all; others are selectively registering users on certain portions of their sites or through contests and personalization features.

All of the large papers that moved to full-site registration last year were pleasantly surprised by the overall impact on traffic. The Washington Post's site saw traffic grow each month from August to October -- in spite of turning on sitewide registration in mid-August, says Tim Ruder, vice president of marketing for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

"We were prepared to lose up to 20% to 25% of our page views during a six-month transition period," reports Digby Solomon, general manager of Chicago Tribune Interactive. Instead, the Chicago Tribune Online Edition experienced only a 10% drop in page views in the first month after registration was implemented. "Then it started climbing back up right after that," Solomon says. "It was a really short blip, and it was over quickly. It was much better than we expected."

At the Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, however, overall site visits are down 19% since April, when the paper began to implement sitewide registration. Still, it counts that as a victory. "We feared a much bigger hit than we got," says Joseph M. Russin, assistant managing editor for multimedia. And the sections of latimes.com that don't require registration, such as classifieds and arts-and-entertainment listings, continue to build their traffic numbers, says Matt Nakano, product manager for the site.

Belo's four daily newspapers rolled out limited registration in 2001 before implementing full-site registration early last year. On average, its Web sites recorded a 30% page-view decline for a few months after turning on full registration, Christensen reports, but then the traffic came roaring back. Belo sites had 1.2 billion page views last year, up from 990 million in 2001. "[Registration] didn't hold back our growth," Christensen says. "Most of our sites had record years in 2002." And once Belo saw that its audience wasn't vanishing, it accelerated the rollout of registration throughout its sites. "There was an ongoing concern about the impact on traffic, and at this point, that's gone," Christensen says.

In Ogden, Utah, the Standard-Examiner witnessed a more alarming post-registration dip. Standard.net was getting about 5 million page views a month before Aug. 18, when it flipped the registration switch, says Online General Manager Mark Shenefelt. At the end of November, the site sank to 2.5 million page views. "We lost about a year of growth," he says, but traffic has started to surge upward again. And, he adds, "What we lost is transient traffic, which probably isn't as important as who we're getting now."

The Bangor (Maine) Daily News had about 2.5 million page views in May, before adding site registration. After a big preliminary drop, page views have now leveled out at about 2 million, says Tim Archambault, new-media coordinator for the paper.

Whatever the final impact on audience, virtually all of the executives contacted say they'd gladly take these traffic declines in exchange for what they've gained (real data about their users, who are more loyal and more active) and what they expect to gain (an advertising payoff).

The ties that bind

"The benefits are already starting to accrue," says Mike Silver, vice president of strategy and development at Tribune Interactive, which has registered 1,587,000 users in Los Angeles and 1,035,000 in Chicago. One of the happy benefits of registration: increased and longer visits by users. "We've made huge leaps in the number of times that people visit," Silver says. "We've formed a tighter bond with our users." The theory is that once a person takes the time to register, he or she will develop stronger affinity for the site.

For a long time, chicagotribune.com was stuck at an average of 2.5 visits a user each month. Since the advent of registration, the average user comes six times a month, Solomon says. "They're spending twice as much time as they were on our site, and they're viewing twice as many pages as they used to," he adds.

As expected, registration has shown that the majority of Web users aren't print subscribers. Belo's The Dallas Morning News has found that only 25% of its registered Web users are readers of the newspaper. This number confirms that DallasNews.com is "a very significant extension of the audience for content and for advertisers," Christensen says. And about a third of the nonprint readers live within the newspaper's circulation area -- providing the circulation department with a new list of potential subscribers. Overall, Belo reports 2.7 million registered users, but the company would not provide breakouts for its specific properties.

Russin will use his registration data to help shape the development of e-mail newsletters -- a big goal for the Los Angeles Times this year. "We can now select males in the L.A. area and offer them an all-L.A. sports e-mail [product] and see how many respond," he explains.

Most newspapers are building their registration systems in-house, though some are turning to vendors such as Clickshare Service Corp. of Williamstown, Mass., and Nando Media of Raleigh, N.C.

Hitting the target

In Chicago, the Tribune has already created an ad-revenue stream from targeted e-mail. "We've been charging as high as $80 to $100 CPM [cost per thousand] for some of those," Solomon says. And by collecting ZIP codes of Web users, the Tribune now has critical mass for its advertising snail-mail program, where the paper sends out packages on behalf of advertisers, according to Silver. By the end of the first quarter this year, the paper hopes to use registration data to begin serving targeted advertising on its Web site.

That demographic targeting is what has long set The New York Times apart from its competitors. Requiring users to register from the very beginning of its Web site in 1996, the Times truly is the master of its domain, with 10 million active registrants today. But, even so, it's gotten more aggressive: A little more than a year ago, The New York Times on the Web beefed up its registration questionnaire to ask users more about their occupations and about their print subscriptions.

"Registration has really worked to our advantage in targeting [advertising to consumers] and building opt-in e-mail lists," says Stephen Newman, deputy general manager of NYTimes.com. Besides the Times' own e-mail products, users can sign up for advertising e-mail messages from sponsoring "tenants" on the registration page, which brings in additional revenue, Newman says.

"Registration is something users have grown to understand," Newman points out. "We've never thought it's presented much of a barrier ... and the payoff has been evident in financial performance." The New York Times Digital unit has had five consecutive quarters of operating profits -- a performance that is surely attributable, in part, to the New York Times Co.'s long history of collecting users' demographics.

Waiting in the wings

Understandably, newspapers large and small are finally looking to turn on registration this year.

* Morris Communications of Augusta, Ga., currently requires registration only for the paid archive site of The Augusta Chronicle, AugustaArchives.com. Many Morris sites have implemented registration for special services such as online ad-order entry, e-mail alerts, and message boards, and now they plan to roll out "much more widespread registration requirements later this year, and in some cases we'll follow The New York Times model," says Steve Yelvington, vice president of strategy and content for Morris Digital Works. "But we want to be careful about when and how we introduce access control, because we've built a profitable model based on high traffic and open access." Yelvington expects a registration rollout by the second quarter of this year, beginning at the Chronicle, The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, and the Lubbock (Texas) Avalanche-Journal.

* In Atlanta, registration is currently only required for message-board posting and contest entry at Cox Newspapers Inc. But a spokeswoman says a registration tool for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and its sibling newspapers would be rolled out within a year.

* The E.W. Scripps Co. of Cincinnati has budgeted for the costs of building registration systems, but probably will allow local properties to implement their own strategies, says Bob Benz, general manager of interactive media for its newspapers. "Some papers are in competitive markets where registration might cause them some heartburn," he says. An example would be Denver, where the Rocky Mountain News, owned by Scripps, is in a joint operating agreement with The Denver Post, owned by MediaNews Group Inc. While the papers are business partners, they still compete editorially. "I think the editor there needs to have some say in whether or not we require registration," Benz says.

Eric Grilly, president of MediaNews Group Interactive, says registration in one form or another would begin appearing on the chain's sites shortly.

"We think most markets will welcome registration," Scripps' Benz says. "They've had tremendous growth in traffic in the past few years, but a lot of our traffic may be casual users who aren't giving our advertisers a lot of value -- and that traffic is costing us money in bandwidth costs. Our mantra has been 'Bigger is better: Build, build, build.' But you want to be a destination that people value enough that they're willing to give some user information. If [the users] aren't willing to do that, how valuable are we to them?"

Benz wonders if the rush toward registration might even allow newspapers to transcend their corporate boundaries. "Is there the potential to start sharing users across newspapers and maybe look at things less competitively? If I have a registered user on my site from South Florida and he's not in my circulation area, maybe I can share that user with another newspaper. Things get complicated quickly here, but there are opportunities."

* In a report to Wall Street analysts in December, executives from Media General Inc. of Richmond, Va., said: "The standard metric for successful Web operations is becoming registered users. We have increased the number of opportunities for our users to identify themselves," including registration for e-mail services. A spokesman says the chain plans to step up both registration and paid content this year.

* The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., a McClatchy paper, is moving slowly toward the big "R." Competitive concerns are putting the brakes on full-site registration for now -- the newspaper is fighting local CBS affiliate WRAL-TV, which has a strong Web presence. Mark Choate, vice president of interactive media, initially will focus on gathering more information in selective areas where the site already requires registration, such as its prize center. Later in the year, his team will consider rolling out registration to editorial sections.

A McClatchy property without the same competitive concerns, The Modesto (Calif.) Bee, will move more quickly. "We hope to have our initial registration accessible in eight to 12 weeks, and it will be voluntary at first," says Eric Johnston, director of online services. "We don't have plans to lock down existing content within this year." But the Bee will require registration for new content to the site, such as a new high-school-sports section slated to kick off this fall. "We're going to use this next year to gauge the reaction of our readers."

But not everyone is on board the registration railroad. The nation's two largest newspaper groups, Gannett Co. Inc. of McLean, Va., and Knight Ridder of San Jose, Calif., don't currently require users to register for Web access. A Gannett spokeswoman says all of its papers require registration for some sections, such as games or archives, but there are no plans for sitewide registration. Through a spokeswoman, executives at Knight Ridder Digital declined to comment for this article. Another large chain, Advance Publications, didn't return a phone call by press time.

Papers owned by the New York Times Co., including The Boston Globe, do not now require registration for Web-site admission, with the exception of the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Mass., which is charging a subscription fee for online access.

Advice: No registration required

With all signs pointing toward registration, what advice do the "veterans" have for publishers considering this route?

"Make sure you have a customer-service infrastructure in place to walk people through the process to remember passwords, reset passwords," says Newman of NYTimes.com. "If you fail in that area, you're going to lose a lot of people."

All of the papers that turned on registration last year strongly agree with that tip. "We prepared people in advance," says the Chicago Tribune's Solomon, whose paper ran a consumer-education campaign to alert readers of the pending change. "We tested registration with over 700 people in advance to find the interface problems. That was a big help."

At Belo, Christensen says it got just one complaint for every 100 registrations. And only 0.2% were "violently opposed" to the concept of registration. A team of Dallas-based customer-service representatives
responds to every complaint and query sent to Belo's Web sites, Christensen says. The L.A. Times has a similar team, and while it expected a 5% complaint/response rate, it got only 2%, Nakano says.

To cut down on negative user responses, "the usability and presentation of registration pages is absolutely critical," says Shenefelt in Ogden, Utah. "It's got to be really tested before you take it live, and you've got to be prepared to listen to readers because they'll notice some things that you didn't see during the testing process."

Russin in L.A. adds, "You have to give people the reasons why you're asking for this information." Consumers expect a thorough explanation of why the data collection is necessary and what the publisher plans to do with the data.

"We're going to make sure we've done the right things to protect privacy and make sure we have a well-written policy," says Choate of The News & Observer.

Silver of Tribune Interactive cautions that the registration process itself can inflate page views. "You need to let yourself run for a few months after registration before you know where you really are with traffic," he says. "The registration process creates some noise in your traffic as those registration pages themselves create additional page views."

But, most important, "know what your objectives are before you begin," says Silver. For example, if you need only to collect e-mail addresses, you probably don't need sitewide registration.

Be prepared for some agonizing internal discussions. In L.A., the editorial and circulation staffs jousted over which questions should be included in their questionnaire, which is one of the industry's longest. "Circulation felt it was really important to gain a much more robust sense of paper usage and Web-site usage," Russin says. "You want to ask the fewest number of questions possible, but you want to be thorough, too." Including questions about print readership will help Tribune papers develop premium online content that will be available only to print subscribers.

As a national site, washingtonpost.com opted to keep its registration form very simple to lessen the impact on traffic, about 6 million unique users a month. It asks only for your year of birth, sex, and ZIP code (or country if you're a non-U.S. resident). "The simplicity and speed of the experience was crucial to consumer acceptance, and we felt very strongly that we only wanted to collect those pieces of information that we could act on and act on immediately," Ruder says. So far, about 12.3 million have registered, 30% in the Washington area. Ruder says the infrastructure is flexible enough to allow the site to ask more demographic questions later, should the market demand that.

"I could capture all kinds of additional information and never act on it," Ruder says. "Make sure you're able to use the data that you capture. Keep it simple, keep it fast." Once you've determined your goals and picked the appropriate registration questions, Ruder advises, just "do it, do it."