Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in How many does registration keep out?

Re: How many does registration keep out?

mathewi — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:18:01 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Lucas -- so you have a reg wall that only pops
up after a certain number of visits? That's interesting. A good
idea, I think. It's possible that I have followed links to the LA
Times before and so tripped that wire without knowing it -- I know I
clicked through to the Lazarus piece several times over a period of
days, so maybe that did it.

Re: How many does registration keep out?

lucasjosh — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:40:16 -0000

I work in the Interactive section of the LA Times and the registration wall shouldn't go up on your first visit, instead your 8th or so. I can't control the wall but I can at least find out why it happened like this.

Re: How many does registration keep out?

mathewi — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 04:48:01 -0000

I totally agree with registration for comments, Karoli -- if you don't
give people at least a bit of a hurdle to clear, then there's a lot
more noise as opposed to signal. But I'm not sure the registration
helps target people -- I assume the majority of people who fill them
out lie anyway. Cookies and IP sniffing seem like they would work
just fine for advertising purposes, and they are unobtrusive.

Re: How many does registration keep out?

Karoli — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 04:41:27 -0000

Back when I worked for the CNN community, we started with no registration. Anyone, anywhere could come to the site, read, and leave comments or debate the issues on the message boards. That ended the night Princess Diana was killed. For us, the question wasn't who would we keep out, but who SHOULD we keep out?

Today things are a bit different. The LA Times, NY Times registrations are intended to be tradeoffs -- you register, they track. They track what you do and how you do it, and the tradeoff for you is reading their content free.

I think it's a dumb way to operate, but they absolutely do need a way to track visitors that will allow them to get targeted advertising or media buys at prime rates. With the ongoing outcry over privacy, the best and safest way to gather those metrics is to force registration and subsequent logins. Unfortunately.

The way it should work: Register to leave comments. No registration to read articles, but an interstitial ahead of the first article informing the user that cookies are used to track usage and interest.