The paywall: a user experience nightmare

Posted on | July 4, 2010 | 1 Comment

The Times has just installed The Great Paywall of China; a method they hope will bring in revenue and revitalise an industry in which the physical goods (newspapers) have been under threat from the online versions. Check out a bit more on the paywall over at the Guardian: Will the paywall work?

Elsewhere, Londoners have almost certainly noticed the introduction of the free Evening Standard, which is now being handed out to commuters as freely as the arguably inferior Metro. What baffles me is how can a physical newspaper become free when one of the news websites is trying to get people to cough up?

Registration

It may be a different style of content, but if I want to get people to comment on my blog, I don’t require them to register in order to have their say. Similarly, if I ran a news site and I wanted as many people as possible to see it as their “go-to” site for news, I wouldn’t require them to register just to view the content.

I suspect that if The Times required registration but they didn’t charge, they’d still lose a lot of readers. The fact is, a lot of people are casual viewers. It’s not so much that the attention span of the average person is dwindling; it’s more that we can’t be bothered to sign up for every damn site that asks us to.

Hoops

Quite simply, most people will not jump through a lot of hoops unless it’s something they really want. Even then, most people will just walk away if they’re faced with a login screen, let alone a paywall. I’m constantly reminded of the 90-9-1 rule for participation inequality:

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Perhaps The Times is OK with shutting out the casual viewers.

Sharing

Ignoring casual readers seems crazy when you consider how much content is shared via social media sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon and Digg. No I’m not going to give you numbers, as I don’t have them, and fully accept this makes my argument rather poor.

Twitter alone is a very, very active community, and its power cannot be understated. Even if you do use it just to spam people with your blog link, a lot of people swear by it. Sh*t! See?

Perks

While blocking guests from viewing such a large amount of content is not ideal, registration can be encouraged if perks are attached to it. The same can be said of the paywall. Let people read some content for free, give them more if they pay. Fewer people would pay, but surely more people would use the site overall.

One thing to remember here: people who read content for free one day might be inclined to pay for perks tomorrow. Forcing everyone to fit into a one-tier, pay-only model severely limits the audience for the site. With the other model, there’s less risk, and more likelihood of more people paying. In theory, anyway…

Caution

It’s early days, but on the web, sites can fall out of the public consciousness almost overnight. So it’s a bit of a gamble to, uh, gamble a business on such a limited and poorly thought out idea as the paywall.

I’m guessing my cheque isn’t in the post. Not that you’d know where to send it, as I haven’t added my name and address to the database…

Category: User experience

Comments

One Response to “The paywall: a user experience nightmare”

  1. The Times: With the paywall up, now they’re spamming Twitter : Ben Barden
    July 7th, 2010 @ 9:04 pm

    [...] I wrote about the Paywall installed by The Times, which I called a user experience [...]

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