Why Hide Content? What We Should Learn from The Times Online
Registration Screen from the Times
Not to continue beating a dead horse, or to steal Patrick’s thunder by continuing to rift on the fading glory that is the Newspaper, but there’s been a pretty interesting experiment that’s being going on across the pond that has the potential to change the way we access news online. I’m talking about The Times’ (of London) institution of a pay-for-content scheme, or paywall.
As of July 2, 2010 only The Times’ homepage is available to the public. Attempting to click through to any full story results in an automatic redirect to the registration screen shown above. Current costs are £1 for a daily pass or for a trial month’s worth of access, and could potentially go up over time.
Granted, this is not the first time a major news publication has instituted a paywall – The New York Times has said they’ll charge frequent users a flat fee for online content starting in 2011, and The Wall Street Journal has had a successful paywall in place for nearly a decade. However, many see it as the first big test of a major web player moving from a completely open platform to a 100% paid content model.
What interests us here at Manning, however, isn’t the seemingly catastrophic failure of the paywall in the past month (Times has reportedly lost somewhere between 66% to 90% of their daily viewers), but what happened before a fee was ever put in place. 5 weeks before The Times started charging for their content, they instituted a mandatory registration for all viewers. There was no fee involved at that time, users just needed to provide their name, email and create a password before being redirected to the desired article. And yet users fled in droves – 58% of the Times’ daily users left when confronted with the registration screen, even though they weren’t asked for payment.
Alexia rankings show the sudden plunge of The Times visitors
I can’t speak for the rest of Manning, but I know I’d have been one of that 58%. I am so used to having information at my fingertips and instantly accessible that mandatory registration for anything is enough to turn me off. And I do mean anything – I’ve walked away from everything from discount travel tickets to video game sites because of registration requirements. For example, one of my favorite news aggregator sites Stumbleupon.com recently changed their homepage to require registration before you could start “stumbling” or browsing their content – moving away from the 100% open model that they’d started with. I used to be a semi-serious stumbler, visiting the site almost daily. Now I never go, and though I miss some of their features (excellent organizational structure!!) I don’t see the services they provide as being unique enough to justify my registering. I just browse other, slightly less organized aggregators instead.
It is this type of cagey user attitude that we urge all our clients to consider the impact of a permissions wall carefully – paid or not. The Wall Street Journal gets away with it because they are a recognized source of highly specialized industry information that cannot be attained elsewhere. For smaller, less established sites even the simplest of registration forms will act as a drop point that costs the site users both on a daily and long term basis.
