What Is The ROI Of Requiring User Registration To Access Online Content?
I somehow got logged out of my NYTimes.com registration and just hit the registration wall when I tried to read an article — I almost forgot it was there. Which made me wonder, now that the TimesSelect pay wall is gone …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands two months into the aftermath of the TimesSelect shutdown. In October, analysts were still working through why the pay wall failed: Rough Type laid out the business case for TimesSelect, Compete measured what happened when the Times freed its op-eds and archives in its open-access experiment, and Read/WriteWeb argued the pay wall was only half the problem. The headline concession — paid columns going free — was settled by fall.
What Publishing 2.0 adds on December 27 is the next question down the stack: with payment off the table, NYTimes.com still requires every reader to register before reading anything. The author only noticed because being logged out surfaced a wall that had become invisible — which is itself the analytical point about whether that friction earns its keep.
First-order effects
- Every anonymous visit to NYTimes.com hits a mandatory registration gate, so the Times trades immediate readership for a database of identified users it can target ads against and re-contact.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers are the counterparty: a registered audience lets the Times sell targeting and reach guarantees that an open site cannot, making registration a pricing lever rather than just a barrier.
Third-order effects
- If registration data demonstrably pays for itself, expect other newspapers to copy the free-but-identified model as the default alternative to both open access and subscription walls; if not, the friction argument collapses back toward fully open distribution.
The trend: Newspaper sites are shifting from charging for content to monetizing reader identity, using registration walls as the middle path between open access and pay walls like the one TimesSelect just abandoned.