Many sites demand that you register before reading, say, simple articles from today’s news. WHY? I’m not going to post anything, not going to buy anything–I just want to read a column or two.
So I have to hop over to hotmail or Yahoo, open a junk email account as John Doe, and register with the New York Times. Now I am deemed “officially registered”, and the Times will freely let me read its entire site.
What does the Times benefit from this? They still know nothing about me.None of the spam they may generate will ever reach me, because I don’t even remember the email address I just created. All I have done is waste time, bandwidth, and disc space at both hotmail and the NYTimes.
What am I misunderstanding here?
Well, your average internet user is more than likely not going to make an address soley for that purpose, and give them their primary one. Then, any spam sent their way is actually recieved.
Please note, though, that I’m not even sure that these sites sell their lists to others. If that’s the case, then I have no clue why they’re collecting addresses though.
And also, let me add, that I find requiring registration extremely annoying, and usually just click the back button if I get to a news site which requires it.
Not an answer, but when I run across one that requires registration, I go to bugmenot.com and get an ID and password from there.
Note: AFAIK, there is nothing illegal about bugmenot, although I know that news sites don’t like it. Also AFAIK, it doesn’t list user names/passwords for sites you have to pay for.
The reason they require registration is so they can prove to advertisers that they have “50 million unique email addresses” which (theoretically) translates to 50 million unique users, as opposed to 10 million users who just visit the page five times each.
Presumably, there’s no reason any one should register with more than one email address, so each registered email signifies yet another unique user, and some advertisers will pay more for the larger audience.
Of course, in actual practice some people register to the site multiple times because they forgot their old password; but in general, the number gives the site a rough way to track how many unique users are on the site. Tracking by any other method (such as the IP address of your computer) is even more flawed because some people may be accessing the site from multiple computers (ie, home and work).
The NY Times specifically says that they dont use your personal info, and I believe them, since when I registered there (a couple years ago) I checked my “fake” email address that I gave them, and there was no spam.
Sometimes they ask a lot of questions (your education level, income, occupation, etc)–but I always just check a few options at random–sometimes I’m a 30 year old PHd scientist, sometimes I’m a retired farmer.I feel sorry for any advertising manager who tries to build a marketing campaign based on my answers
So what do they gain by making me register? I just dont get it.
Allow me to say that this is almost certainly not true. The goal for web registration is almost always to track user pathways and increase targeted advertising. Rarely is it to sell subscriptions to newspapers (a losing proposition in most cases for the newspaper…no fooling).
Due to the nature of my work I am, literally, registered (with my real information) at more than 400 news sites. I don’t get offers from most of them. Nor do I receive inordinate numbers of snail mail offers from firms I would considered ‘allied’ to these sites.
Jonathan Chance
15 year veteran of newspapers, magazines, circulation services and web services.
They gain the ability to put together, for their advertisers, a demographic breakdown of what their readers claim to be. This is audited by firms like BPA International and others. This is a longstanding business practice in publishing and promotes advertiser decisions and comfort-level. Many advertisers will simply not make a buy without some form of audit backing up the stated circulation/web visitors of the publication.
I’ve never bothered with that; usually I just back out of any site requiring registration, but if I’m in the mood to read the offending article anyway, I just randomly fill in junk for the stats. I wonder if they throw out all the 97 year old CEOs making $10,000 that have imaginative e-mail addresses like a@b.com?
As a columnist for a big city newspaper, I’ll second what **tavistmorph2 ** says. My paper (and I presume others) want to show advertisers how many online subscribers they have. This is to help them bundle the sale of print ads and web ads. They also want to be able to show demographic information, most particularly the amount of out-of-town readers they attract on the web.
If you’re a FireFox user, there’s an extension available that integrates the BugMeNot website into a right-click option. Automatically does the look-up and fill in. It’s great.
This is mainly the result of PHBs (“Pointed Haired Bosses”). Idiot managers who confuse data with information. I deliberately fill in whatever data I feel like at the time. That’s not information. It’s useless and all such data collected by user fill-ins on the web are useless.
A few years ago in Wired a website admin said that half of all users of his site were CEOs of their own company who make over a million dollars a year. So I’m sure his PHB is thrilled.
If it’s a 100% guaranteed no-spam email address they want, okay. Otherwise …
So, fight against the ignorance of the PHBs, don’t go along with it.
