Hearst’s Houston Chronicle dropped mandatory registration Monday as part of a redesign of its site.
It will be interesting to see how dropping the registration requirement will affect the use of, and links to, its news stories by bloggers and others on the Web.
Registration data has to be a lot less useful in selling advertising than it was in the old days. Advances in behavioral targeting have made the kind of primitive demographics captured by registration to seem awfully primitive. Then, there’s the fact that Internet advertising has become a lot easier to sell in the last couple of years.
But, I’ve long considered the fact that only one industry (newspapers) requires registration to read its content to be prima facie evidence that registration is a bad idea.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.