Wired News Discovers The Tools Of Registration Avoidance

Miscellaneous

from the so-many-registrations dept

We’ve explained over and over again why newspapers that think they need to force users to register to view their paper are making a big mistake. They’re shrinking their ad inventory, pissing off the readers they do have and getting dirty useless data on the registrations they are getting. While many newspapers claim that their audience levels have reached the same levels as they were before they put in registration, shouldn’t that make them wonder how big they would be if they had no registration at all? Instead of registrations, shouldn’t they be looking to give their readers something of value? Anyway, for those of us who read an awful lot of news sites and get constantly hung up by annoying registration required sites, Wired News has put together an article of tools people use to get around registrations. Most regular news surfers probably use all of these pretty frequently, but they include services like BugMeNot and Mailinator, both of which I find myself using on a daily basis. Obviously, the decision is up to the sites themselves if they want to include registration, but it shows a decided lack of understanding of what makes the web work.