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July 22, 2004 Much Ado about
Nothing? There's been a little storm brewing over the past few months. Right now it's centered in the world of online newspapers, but it actually has repercussions for any website that asks visitors to register before they view free content. BugMeNot.com is a website that provides visitors, free of charge, access to already set-up usernames and passwords to access free content behind registration. It allows people to read the information without the quid pro quo of providing their personal data. You can even add them to your toolbar to get instant login information (if it's available) for any site: The newspapers are, understandably, upset about this attempt to bypass their registration (which is how they gather demographic data to sell ad space to advertisers). The BugMeNot people and their clients stress that people can and do lie when they fill out registration forms, so much of the data the websites are collecting is useless anyway. They also promise not to post login information for paid-content websites (and appear to be enforcing this). Even a former colleague of mine (Hi Travis!) at Variety.com (Along with a few other team members, we revamped Variety's e-mail newsletters and online registration back in 2000. Registration has been revamped again since; our pages didn't ask for the U.S. Postal Address Amy Gahran references here) got pulled into the fray:
This type of thing isn't unique or new. Months ago stories also surfaced that you could access many of the free-but-registration-protected newspaper sites by using 'freethepresses' as both username and password (if the site required that the username was an e-mail address, it was freethepresses@example.com). No one appears to know who did it, but I can confirm that it used to work (although I haven't tried it lately). So what should you do, as an online marketer who has free content behind registration or is thinking about putting some there? I don't think focusing on BugMeNot or trying to find whoever set up the FreethePresses logins is the answer. These things are symptoms of the problem, not the cause. Registration is basically a swap; it's a barter transaction where the website visitor trades personal information for access to content. The problem arises when the information required by the content provider exceeds, in the visitor's mind, the value of the content they'll get in return. This is nothing new. Back in 1999 and 2000 when I worked with a great team to develop e-mail newsletters and registration pages for Variety and other Reed Elsevier US (formerly Cahners Business Information) magazine websites we had these same issues. Most of the online registration pages we inherited were based on print publication controlled circulation forms. That means they asked lots of questions (lots and lots of questions!), most having to do with buying authority, budgets and upcoming needs (3 months, 6 months, etc.). The data was then used to sell online and e-mail ads as well as e-mail lists to advertisers. This model was pulled directly from the offline world (where the forms were paper, not electronic, and the information was used to sell ads in the print publications and U.S. Postal Service direct mail lists). Back then there were no BugMeNots or FreethePresses logins for online registration. Visitors could either:
We used to joke that we actually wanted to thank the people who had lied and told us their first name was 'Mickey,' last name 'Mouse,' with an address of '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue;' at least we could identify the information as bogus. People who were less obvious with their false identities would make it through our filters and taint the advertiser information. With registration and e-mail list growth lagging, we undertook an overhaul of registration (among other initiatives) to fix it. Tips for Making
Your Registration User-friendly The keys to success we identified there still serve me well with my clients today. They include:
The best way to protect your website login from BugMeNot and FreeThePresses is to streamline your registration and make it less intrusive for the visitor. If they trust you and you aren't crossing boundaries with what you ask for, they'll provide the information you want. But What About the
Advertisers? If you're looking for household income information (which people are hesitant to provide), ask for zip code (which most people are willing to provide); you can extrapolate from there based on third-party data. There are easy ways around data you really need; for other stuff, you will just have to make do with less (like collecting U.S. Postal Service addresses and telephone numbers just so you can rent those list to direct and tele- marketers). Or create a benefit to the visitor around gather that information, one with a value equal to their cost of providing the data. And if you don't modify your registration? You'll end up being a favorite on BugMeNot, have someone with the username 'freethepresses' logged-in almost constantly, find that many of your visitors share names and addresses with famous people and that most are unemployed with no household income and no plans to purchase anything in the near future. Which won't please your advertisers either. Website visitors are rebelling against intrusive registration. It's an artificial barrier which they won't cooperate with if it they deem it too intrusive. The BugMeNot Debate
Streamlining Your Own
Website's Registration
Give me a call or send me an e-mail. Best,
Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear what you have to say. Feel free to contact me with any thoughts or feedback about this publisher's note. |
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