The trend toward mandatory user registration on news Web sites is growing. It hit close to home a few weeks ago when the Globe and Mail announced that free access to parts of its site would soon be denied to anyone who hasn't registered.
To continue accessing breaking news, daily stories and their seven-day archive, visitors will need to provide their name, e-mail address and some basic demographic information. According to their FAQ, this is so they can "better understand our audience so that we can tailor our content to their needs and interests."
An additional benefit is that they can charge sponsors higher rates for advertising directed towards targeted demographic and geographic audience segments.
The Globe also announced the launch of Insider Edition, a second tier of value-added content and services for users willing to pay $14.95/month (less for print edition subscribers) to access the complete website. This includes exclusive access to the day's editorials, columns and crosswords, e-mail alerts, breaking news from the Wall Street Journal and a thirty-day archive.
The value and utility of the Globe's online content is relative to the individual consumer, their information requirements and their personal views on registration. For many, it is unquestionably worthwhile and a select margin will become full paid subscribers. The majority will just become registered users. And a bitter minority will threaten to cancel their print subscriptions in impotent disgust and swear that their personal information will never be contained in any database owned or controlled by the Globe and Mail.
That minority, like so many other minorities who were formerly ardent fans of the world's content websites, have been, in many cases, turning towards BugMeNot.com for a password allowing them to bypass compulsory registration. This moderated website lets consumers anonymously share active user names and passwords for almost 30,000 websites (though not for paid content areas due to the easily-calculable damage costs in potential litigation).
Each listed site is considered "liberated" when login information is first included in the database.
"BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of websites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times)," its FAQ declares. NYTimes.com and WashingtonPost.com are currently the two most popular sites for which logins are requested, and it is unknown exactly where GlobeAndMail.com ranks.
Getting around mandatory registration to access content for free saves consumers time, forgives them for not remembering passwords or bogus registration information, is easily portable from machine to machine, grants them a tiny bit more privacy and anonymity (having their name on one less e-mail list) and allows a person to feel clever, like they're performing a low-level hack and not getting caught.
But even with the conveniences and efficiencies for users who don't want to be encapsulated in a demographic segment and marketed towards, doing this can be onerous as many publishers are periodically visiting BugMeNot.com to see what logins are listed and to remove them from their own systems. It will likely eventually become a null-game where logins are made public and disabled in quick succession.
Many website publishers view the usage of BugMeNot.com as the digital equivalent of copying someone's keys and trespassing.
Interestingly, the perspective on this contrasts slightly with the tolerated issue of bogus user information which is used by many people when registering for websites. They enter fictional information (the name of their favourite athlete & Bill Gates' e-mail address) into various databases. When e-mail confirmations are required, Mailinator.net anti-spam throw-away e-mail addresses usually do the trick.
Unfortunately, statistics aren't available on exactly how many bogus accounts are created on most sites because the registrants almost never receive or participate in marketing or survey initiatives.
It would be spectacular if the "spirit" of the World Wide Web could remain (become) idealistically pure and the aether was a place where all information roams free, as its inventor Tim Berners-Lee intended in a nirvana-like moment. Unfortunately, the maturing online content marketplace as well as an increasing demand from advertisers for demographic information has been causing pressure on content creators to get that data even if it means disenfranchising and alienating portions of their audience.
The content sites have had a tough choice to make: should their sites be optimized for the best user experience or for capturing an optimum quantity of quality user information for current use and future profiling? The goal is certainly to have it all logically interconnect to the benefit of all three interested parties, but, for now The Globe has made its choice, following the path taken by CanWest Global's National Post and the Canada.com network last year.
We are seeing the local evolution of content from free to fee, with a stop for user registration along the way.