Has anyone else noticed the membership wall that the Washington Post website Washingtonpost.com has erected? Visit the site, click ANY headline or navigation link and you are redirected to the page below. It wasn’t always like this and I don’t like it at all. Every time I just click off, and visit NYTimes.com or some other news site where the info is still free.
If I really want to see a particular article I can back into it by copying and pasting the article title into Google news and then clicking through the search result. This works for WSJ paid content too which makes me wonder if these large publisher have an agreement with Google, but at the same time are angry about it.
What has been your experience on their site? I remember being able to read national headlines without logging in. So while others are going to paywalls, The Washington Post is moving to a membership wall? Maybe just for the time being. I’m hoping this is an experiment that will transform into something better. I will never create an account and then log in to any newspaper’s website just to read one article and I suspect that others will not either.
UPDATED ON APRIL 9-2009
Why are they doing this? When newspaper websites do what the washingtonpost site is doing, they are looking for ways to behaviorally target their readers and charge higher CPM’s to their advertisers.
What I would do:
If you are dead set on maintaining one catch-all newspaper-on-a-computer website then instead of a required login, how about selling a sponsored ad on the “sign in” page then automatically redirecting to the article? Hulu.com has a relatively non intrusive model where you can view a ~1min. 30sec. ad before watching a show OR you can elect to watch short commercials throughout the show.
Better yet:
Break your massive newspaper-on-a-computer website into stand alone niche sites where the user demographic is already known. This idea is not new, it has been suggested many times and is being successfully used by blog networks like Gawker Media:
Doing this accomplishes many things that newspaper sites currently stink at.
- builds a stonger community of interested members
- people are more willing to register and subscribe to targeted content
- advertisers are more willing to pay higher cpm’s for targeted content
- more efficiently allocate resources
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“newspaper-on-a-computer” is right. They still don’t get it and by the time they do, something better has come along already. I visit newspaper news sites right now out of neccessity, not because they are good or provide a great experience, but because I have to.
As soon as i find alternatives i replace it. so for example i never ever visit a newspaper news site for anything that i can’t find elsewhere like yahoo business for business news and rotten tomatoes for movie reviews…
Good post.
When confronted with sites that insist on me registering i just visit http://www.bugmenot.com/
They have all the stuff you need.
Yeah – It really gets my goat, so I end up reading and looking at ads on nytimes.com. Nice tip about bugmenot.com. I think it’s a lose lose situation for the post (they’ll only be able to fool advertisers for so long until they realize the inflated CPM is bogus).
Glad to see Smokey Robinson is dropping some knowledge on this blog… heh.
It seems the exercise is over. The wall has come down. I can access everything as of this writing.