PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- Imagine if a trip to the corner newsstand required handing over your name, address, age, and income to the cashier before you could pick up the daily newspaper.
That's close to the experience of many online readers, who must complete registration forms with various kinds of personal data before seeing their virtual newspaper...
Source: CNN.com
I cannot stand news sites that require you to login. I feel pretty lame for not knowing about BugMeNot.com (thanks Jake). I have been flat out boycotting those bleeping sites. Now I at least can try this site.
One of the online campus publishing companies that tried their darndest to court us, College Publisher, requires you to login on all their partner sites. Those are college newspapers folks. That is just lame. Only a slightly bit more lame then the commercial sites that require you to login.
I am not upset about the privacy. I have said this before and I will say it again. If you are smart enough to open a web browser, you just gave up your online privacy. The problem is that the demographic data that these sites gather are going after it all wrong. I don't even want to put in what zip code I live in when I go to a site (I think WSJ does that).
That business model, the one of gathering demographic data is all off. Its the Web. Excuse my language but use the damn web statistics package that is running on your server to figure out where in the world I live. There is just no excuse!
Why does a news site need to know my email address? So they can (a) SPAM me or (b) give/sell my address to someone else that will SPAM me. I do not care how they state it, they either do A or B. Why do they need to know my name, age, etc? I am glad you asked, let me explain.
It was the stupid idea of some bean counter, or the boss of some bean counter at the newspaper who thinks that he can count his Web site visitors like his paper reading subscribers. The Web is not print, and people need to wake up and realize that.
I cannot think of one reason why requiring me to login to a news site is worth the aggravation and alienation of someone who has chosen to come to your web site. I just go somewhere else. Simple as that.
Web newspaper registration stirs debate
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Comments (4)
Well, the need to count readership is important. It allows the paper to sell ad space for the amounts they ask. If a paper only has 10,000 readers, they won't be able to ask the kind of money a paper that has 10,000,000 readers does.
Don't get me wrong, I feel the same way and I have blogrolled that site for future use, but I think curculation is what they are trying to calculate.
Personally, they need to based their "circulation" on webpage hits, not user signups. Expcially with a site like BugMeNot. :)
Posted by Dave M. | June 16, 2004 1:43 AM
Posted on June 16, 2004 01:43
Before bugmenot.com I was a 99 year old woman, an executive in the arospace industry with an income of less than $10k, single with 4 children and a high school education. How anyone could justify collecting obviously spurious information like this for any reason is beyond me.
Posted by David | June 16, 2004 3:13 PM
Posted on June 16, 2004 15:13
Minor thing: It's "College" Publisher, not Campus Publisher -- I should know as I used to work for one of their competitors. :) Heck, considering how many times they've been bought out lately, I have no idea what they call themselves any more.
But yes, any news organization who bases their advertising targeting on those things is a moron. Like Dave, I always lied about it. I was usually a woman, born before the turn of the 20th century (or after the turn of the 21st), made a crap-load of many, despite having only a high school education. They can have a user survey, but make it optional and non-intrusive.
Posted by Jake | June 16, 2004 4:58 PM
Posted on June 16, 2004 16:58
I think I was thinking of Campus Engine, one of those names before College Publisher. heh. Like you said, who can keep track. I was never very happy with Campus Engine other then the fact that I love the Cold Fusion language.
Anyway. It seems that a lot of people over at Blogcritics are sticking up for the entire registration theme (see the comments to this post at BC). But I have no idea why.
Posted by Ken Edwards | June 16, 2004 5:36 PM
Posted on June 16, 2004 17:36