Don’t Make us Register to Read

Sift Media have recently updated a few of their websites, including AccountingWeb and BusinessZone.

They look really good – a lot better than they did, but there’s something they’ve introduced that I think is a big mistake.

In order to read an article in full you need to register on the site.

I can understand why, from their perspective, they’d want to go down this route. It means they can capture the email addresses of their readers and also get more demographic data in order to become more attractive to advertisers.

But I don’t think it works. Ultimately less people will read the full articles because they don’t care about it enough to go through the registration process.

Also, less people will share links.

AccountingWeb wrote wrote yesterday about some big changes we have going on, and we also got a mention in an article today about Sage’s UK MD using Twitter.

Being the self-referencing media-whore that I am, I’d usually post links to them both on Twitter. But I didn’t bother as I knew a lot of people that would click the link wouldn’t be registered and wouldn’t read the whole thing – and perhaps would rather not be bothered by links to articles they can’t read without investing extra time to register.

As I say, I can see why they’ve done it, but I think – long term – it’s a mistake.

Update: When discussing this on Twitter recently, @metalshark pointed me in the direction of bugmenot.com. A useful site if you care enough to want to read a full article on a site like the above but don’t have the time or patience to register properly.