NY Post Wants To Stick With Pointless, Broken Registration System
from the good-luck-with-that-plan dept
The New York Post is nothing if not stubborn. After surprising readers with a registration system that simply didn't work, causing plenty of frustration, the Post has announced that they'll be keeping the system. This makes almost no sense. First, they've pissed off a good portion of their readers who couldn't actually read the content they wanted. Second, of those who did try to register, many found they couldn't. On top of that, you have all of the other reasons why newspaper registration doesn't make sense. Beyond filling your database with dirty, useless data it encourages readers to simply go elsewhere while also (oh yeah!) opening up the publisher to greater legal liability for lying to advertises about who's really reading a site. Meanwhile, in an age when the ability to share the news is becoming more important than just being able to read the news, putting up a registration gate makes the news immensely less valuable to many people. Coming so soon after owner Rupert Murdoch talked up the importance of news organization understanding the internet, it looks like the NY Post needs to rethink this idea.
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what evar!
Everyone's waiting for news organizations to dry up so citizen journalism can take over. That is until they realize the citizen journalists are using the news organizations for their research, and and can't afford the bandwidth, etc to host a successfull site.
Once you get beyond school, you'll start to understand what life costs and what it takes to sustain it.
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Re: what evar!
We're very familiar with how the newspaper business works. Some folks at Techdirt actually worked at some well known news organizations for many years. As for the rest of your points, they seem to be based on false assumptions. As many sites have been showing lately, it is possible to make money on newspaper websites -- and it doesn't need to involve registration. In fact, registration tends to do more harm than good. It shrinks the audience, which makes it less valuable to advertisers (and less valuable in terms of getting attention from others). More importantly, the data that they get from registration is so full of dirty data that whatever 'segmentation' and 'qualification' they do is useless.
As for your second point, I'm not sure why you brought up the citizen journalism issue. We certainly didn't. I don't think citizen journalism will "take over." I think it's interesting, and there's a place for it, but it's quite different than professional journalism. So, please, don't make assumptions about what we think on that.
If you want to discuss this, we're certainly willing to engage in a dialog, but considering the combination of insults and false assumptions, it's difficult to know if you're serious about discussing this.
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whatevar brings up some good points
I'm not saying its good to have annoying registrations or dirty data, but it does make sense from their point of view.
Second, the point about research is valid. Most news sites on the internet that are not newspapers/magazines do not pay for their news, nor do they create the content. They aggregate it and summarize the work of the brick and mortor news. If every online only site had to go out and research every story they wrote about, they would be in dire straights too. (and I realize that what passes for most news today is nothing more than cleverly disguised and repackaged press releases.)
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Re: whatevar brings up some good points
You're basically saying that newspapers are better off with fewer visitors and false data, than more visitors and accurate data? Bizarre.
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Re: whatevar brings up some good points
You can get quite a bit of data from log files, but you cant get demographic data. And voluntary input doesnt capture 100% so what, your going to fudge the data by extrapolating to fit the visitor count? How is that cleaner data?
Techdirt corporate intelligence isnt free to the public is it? Even though, according to your logic, you could get more visitors and make up the lack of "blockades" by selling more advertizing.
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Re: whatevar brings up some good points
As for Techdirt, our business model isn't advertising, so I don't see how this discussion applies.
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