August 4, 2004, 8.10pm • 26 comments » • 2,170 Views

Registration Frustration

Two interesting stories with Wired News today about online news publishing (and one about guerrilla gigging).

First, after a couple of weeks of intense discussion about BugMeNot.com and registration in arenas like Poynter, Adam L. Penenberg puts simply the reasons why so many of us are frustrated with newspaper sites that require registration.

Registration, of course, is so prevalent in the commercial sector because operating companies want to generate data about their audiences that can be sold to marketeers as a demographic. But, as Penenberg’s sources point out, who wants to have to register for all the different news sources they read? The result: “The Balkanization of online media.”

Steve Yelvington is having none of this, calling it “another anecdotal, ill-researched, meaningless personal tirade”. “Liars constitute a very, very tiny percentage of the registered user base of real newspaper sites,” he says.

But sometimes anecdotal evidence is the best kind. And Penenberg does say it was “an informal poll of 50 friends and colleagues”. The concerns they voice are shared by me and many more.

On the subject of demographics is the second article, which points out that men are disproportionately represented by the online news audience, when compared with newspaper readerships. If readers lie, how have these figures been affected by anti-registration frustration?

I’m not businessman, an advertiser or a technology expert, but surely the way publishers must overcome antipathy toward registration is to develop a shared access system, in the same way that Passport grants a user access to all kinds of distinct MSN sites or Typekey lets users comment on a variety of weblogs. This way, I could have one registration key to get me into The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail et al.

Individual publishers would, of course, want to protect their own demographic data - but the operating company would have no problem doing that. With registration frustration increasingly looking like a stumbling block to commercial publishing’s success, rather than a boon, the sooner the better.