When people run into something they don’t like, they go somewhere else. When I need to link to a news article as a blogger, I specifically look for a place that doesn’t require registration.

On sites that I use that require registration, I give completely bogus information with a throwaway email address that I never use again. And as spam gets worse and worse, people are going to be more and more reluctant to give out email information.

Sites that put up barriers of any kind, like registration and splitting up content across pages to increase page views don’t have a control to measure against, so of course they think it works great. You can’t measure people you lose online.

I guess I wasn’t clear… they had 100 complaints with a total of 1.6Million new registrations in 3 months in AZ… They didn’t looks for ’silence’ but rather they saw a large, large number of registrations in a very short period of time that basically says “ok, we’ll register” whereas 100 people said ‘no’. That’s not measuring success in silence.

But if you force me to register and sign in without providing me with real and tangible benefits just to build your readership database then I am going to be suspicious and mistrustful of your motives.

As for Belo Interactive’s “success” with forcing registration to view their content, here’s what I’ve seen. Almost everyone I know who used to go to KVUE.com to see their current weather information got annoyed with the forced registration and now goes to a competing TV station’s web site for that information. If Belo Interactive thinks that’s success then maybe somone should ask they how registration has affected their site’s traffic.

If I was an advertiser approached by two media companies with web sites offering similar content and had to choose between one which forced registration to view the content and the other which was open to anyone who happened to stop by I would give the first station a big “strike” when doing the comparison. Registration = roadblock to me, and while some people may take time to register I seriously doubt the demographic information that’s gathered is statistically accurate given that most people don’t want to disclose private information like income or shopping habits.

And also, of people who registered, how many gave totally bogus information?

I agree with Spanky. Registration should be more carrot, less stick. Aren’t Belo Interactive the nitwits who wanted to sue people for “deep linking”? I hope they’ve grown up and gotten a clue since then.

The article on Belo issuing cease and desist letters for “deep linking” (linking to an article instead of the front page) is here:

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52213,00.html