It’s time to wake up and smell the optical fiber. First, take a look at this post by Josh Catone and then come back ready for a rant. You removed TimeSelect in an effort to cleanse the sin of trying to sell content on the Internet; a concept that has failed spectacularly since time immemorial. For this, we all thank you.

However, just when it seemed like you were starting to get this Internet thing, you completely undermine the spirit of removing the pay wall by continuing to force people to register in order to see your content. Without completely rehashing Josh’s sentiments, here are a few more reasons why forcing registration is almost as bad for you as the pay wall.

Walls

Breaking Flow. You are considered a trustworthy source of real, meaty journalism. When a story breaks, scads of people go to you in order to get the truth behind truths. Unfortunately, even a dead simple registration process doesn’t stop a lot of them from looking elsewhere when they realize they have to enter their email address once again just to read your content.

Content itself, no longer has the sort of unique value that justifies placing it behind a wall. It is simply too easy to duplicate. Worse yet, breaking a users flow by placing a registration barrier up is costing you readers. It is the same problem I have with most interstitial ads, no one wants to be stopped before they even get to the content they are looking for. At least with interstitials, you get paid.

Anachronism. Registration as a price of entry is an anachronism. You can try to legitimize it by saying that you are collecting valuable marketing data, but this isn’t print. People who are stopped by the registration process are going to try their best to get it over with quickly. Any data that you collect from these people will be poor, incomplete and sometimes downright false.

Worse yet, for those of us who roam the halls of new media, unnecessary registration is just another brick in our growing wall of, “They don’t understand.” Back before everyone started giving away the barn, using registration as a measure of user engagement made sense. Now that blogging and other forms of fast, free content dissemination have taken hold, registration should only be forced upon someone when it is necessary for a system to function. Call it netiquette 2.0. Actually, don’t.

SEO. Finally, when you put text behind a registration wall it is much more difficult for Google’s army of spiders to smash down your gates in order to index that text. Now that you are relying solely on eyeballs to fuel your online offering, you need to do everything in your power to drive page views. One really simple way to do this is by making accessing your articles as simple as it can be.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Even I will admit registration isn’t that bad.

The nice thing about blocking out unregistered users is that it prevents the hordes of roaming splogs from scrapping your content. Prevents might be too strong of a word, it slows them down. You could also argue that forcing users to register ensures that the traffic you drive isn’t the drive-through readership that does nothing but eat your bandwidth.

Even when you add this to the fact that your registration is relatively painless, I still think it is time to do away with it. You are no longer in the position where maintaining your current reader base will be enough to ensure that you prosper online. You have find a way to grow your readership at a rate that is much faster than it currently is growing at. Since in all likelihood your content won’t improve enough to do this for you, maybe you should start looking into reducing the barriers to entry.

Just some food for thought.

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