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Matt Haughley, a Web developer in Portland,
Ore., registered for access to The New York
Times' Web site years ago -- he can't
remember when exactly. But he does recall
patiently plowing through questions about his
household income and his job title. Then,
either he forgot his password or the Times
lost his records. He was locked out of the
site, and he wasn't about to go through the
aggravation of filling out another lengthy
registration form.
Instead, Haughley found that someone else had
voluntarily posted his or her own registration
information online -- on a message board or a blog, perhaps even his own mega-blog,
MetaFilter.com. Thanks to the shared
information, Haughley avoided the bother of
registering again. "Who wants to fill this [stuff]
out," he says. "I just want to read your dumb
story."
WEB ADS' FUZZY FUTURE.
Look out, Internet publishing world. Your
registration-only content is being threatened.
Cyber-savvy folks like Haughley now have a way
to tap shared site registrations and use them
to access both free and subscription-only
sites. Haughley, for example, says he hasn't
registered for a single site in 2 years.
While this may be a convenience boon to Web
surfers, these community registration systems
pose a problem for online publishers. To boost
ad sales, many content providers require
viewers to answer questions about their gender,
age, and income level before allowing access
to their site. With that information, they can
tell their advertisers exactly what kind of
demographic groups they would be reaching and
then charge a premium to advertise to those
readers.
Take away such registration, and the future of
the $6.6 billion online advertising market
begins to look fuzzy. Advertising typically
accounts for 85% to 90% of an online content
provider's revenues, so this has got to be
troubling. "If lying on registrations becomes
widespread, or communal passwords become
widespread, advertisers might begin to
question the information they're given," says
Neil Budde, founder of online media consulting
outfit the Neil Budde Group, in Richmond Hill,
Ga.
DEDUCING PREFERENCES.
Perhaps most troubling to publishers --
sharing registration information appears to
cross no legal lines, say experts. "There's no
general law that interferes with it," says
Lawrence Lessig, a digital copyright expert at
Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
Operating in that legal limbo, the use of
community passwords is on the rise. Aggregator BugMeNot.com possesses keys to more than
30,000 sites, according to Lessig.
Commenting on the difficulty of stopping
sharing, lawyer Robert Bauer of Brown Raysman
in New York explains: "There's no way to
determine who's using that user name and
password." However, he warns, some might
hesitate to share some subscriptions because
it might enable others to see their credit-card
number and other personal information.
Still, as community passwords spread, Web
publishers may be forced to make major changes.
Some may abandon registrations altogether and
buy software that can deduce what a reader is
like without requiring registration
information, says Gary Stein, an analyst with
market consultancy Jupiter Research in San
Francisco.
MIRRORING PROBLEM.
Companies like Revenue Science and Tacoda
Systems are making software that collects data
about a reader's behavior without requiring
the user to provide any input. It notices that
a reader typically views automotive articles,
for example. In turn, the site might serve
that reader with ads for new cars.
A growing chorus says the only credible
response is to abandon online registrations in
favor of registrations for premium services,
such as message boards. "We use registration
only where it makes sense to do so from a
reader's perspective," explains Adrian Holovaty, lead developer of World Online, the
Web division of The Lawrence Journal-World
newspaper in Lawrence, Kan. "The classic
example is on message boards and comment forms,
where readers want to register so they can own
the rights to their usernames -- and, thus,
their online reputations."
Net collaborators pose other dangers to
publishers. Just in the last month, sites that
completely copy a content providers' site have
popped up. Mirrordot.com first posted in
September copies, summaries, and links of
stories that appear on Slashdot.org, a popular
tech message board. Then Mirrordot.com simply
caches the stories to which Slashdot links. Mirrordot.com, which runs its own ads with the
stories as well as the original sites' ads,
tallies the traffic for itself. And it all
appears quite legal under current law, say
experts.
TOUGH SLOG.
Such "mirroring" is a genuine thorn in Slashdot.org's relationship with publishers,
who usually welcome the attention. Getting "Slashdotted,"
or linked to the chat site, typically leads to
a surge in readers for a Web publisher. Sure, Mirrordot has only attracted about 45,000
visitors, reports co-owner Jay Jacobson. But
that's traffic that other sites -- ones that
actually developed the content -- didn't get.
Already, Slashdot.com has received a number of
complaints from publishers, asking how they
can get links to their stories off Mirrordot.com, says Jeff Bates, co-founder of Slashdot.org. Slashdot is currently in talks
with Mirrordot to try and resolve this, and no
suits have been filed.
On the upside for publishers, getting someone
to read a news organization's "dumb story", as Haughley puts it, may be getting easier. But
making a buck off of content may be getting a
lot harder. |
