Registering Reservations
An article in today's PaidContent discusses an unusual move by the New York Post newspaper to not only impose forced site registration, but to ask for personal details including birth date, email address, zip code and income. Reportedly, the registration form was hurriedly removed after numerous complaints and highly negative press coverage from rival New York papers, although I encountered this very registration form just a few moments ago
What is the New York Post thinking? Who knows, as the Post won't comment on its move to collect a lot of information (making registration much slower), and a lot of very personal information at that.
Even at this late date, publishers remain remarkably divided about the merits of forced registration. Publishers who derive the bulk of their online revenue from advertising generally don't want to lose even a single set of eyeballs against that advertising, and generally opt for no registration at all. That maximizes traffic, but at the expense of knowing much about their online audience.
Another group of publishers believe that, since they are providing valuable content to visitors, it's not unreasonable to ask visitors for some information in return.
Complicating the registration decision is the extreme variation in results when registration is implanted. We know publishers who have seen their site traffic drop by as much as 80% after requiring registration. We also know publishers that have only experienced a 20% drop. We know two publishers whose traffic dropped briefly and then actually began to increase over pre-registration levels. Of course, many of these numbers reflect the anarchic state of Web analytics, which at the moment make it hard to predict the true impact of forced registration.
Leaving aside the tricky question of whether or not to require site registration, here are the ground rules if you go the registration route: ask as few questions as possible (the longer the registration process takes, the more visitors you will lose) and make sure you can fully justify every question you ask. Hey, we're all in the data business, and it's a natural instinct to collect more data. But we've seen more than a few publishers who have taken a traffic hit as a consequence of forced registration, and literally never bothered to look at the data they collected. So don't succumb to data excess or you'll just end up with excess data. If you don't have a known and compelling use for the information, don't collect it.
A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing
I was pleasantly surprised to receive from insurance industry powerhouse A.M. Best a copy of a new publication entitled, "The Guide to Understanding the Insurance Industry." Its 84 pages offer the best plain language explanation of the insurance industry I have ever seen, along with key industry statistics. Not surprisingly, many of the statistics are drawn from various A.M. Best publications, and the text does a subtle yet solid job of showing where A.M. Best products fit in the overall industry picture, what they do and why they are important. In short, A.M. Best is working hard to educate the marketplace about the insurance industry and how its products support that industry.
Nice, but what's the point you say? I have seen several examples lately of clients whose data products are so sophisticated that their subscribers weren't tapping into their full potential, and in at least one case, actually misusing the product. And when subscribers under-use or misuse a database, they don't blame themselves. They blame the publisher -- and don't renew.
This is an interesting new challenge for the industry as publishers increasingly introduce "to die for" datasets that their markets can't fully appreciate without some guidance. The only real solution is to educate users. Don't be fooled into thinking that if subscribers don't understand how to fully use your product, they'll make support calls. Those subscribers who call for support are typically having a problem getting from point A to point B. There is a whole other class of subscriber that doesn't even know point B exists. Unless you educate them about the possibilities, this is a group at risk of drifting away from your product.
The same problem exists even when your product isn't all that sophisticated, but you are moving into new markets with it. A great example is infoUSA, which built its business selling mailing lists to companies that for the most part had never bought a list before. One thing infoUSA learned very quickly is that making the sale was only part of the challenge. It also had to teach its customers the basics of direct mail and to educate them about such things as undeliverable mail. If you have just sent out your first mailing and get 300 pieces back marked "undeliverable," it is not unreasonable to conclude you've been cheated. But if those 300 undeliverable pieces came from a mailing of 10,000 pieces, that's not a bad result -- but the customer would not know that unless educated in advance. I have long contended that infoUSA's remarkable success in the treacherous small business market was due in large part to its educational efforts.
We all take data for granted. After all, it's our business. But we should never forget it's typically not the main business of our customers, and that an investment to educate our subscribers will yield an impressive long-term return.
Curb Your [Upgrade] Enthusiasm
Most print database publishers have learned -- often the hard way -- that you don't mess with success, or even failure for that matter. Directory users are highly resistant to change, so even improvements come with real risk attached. What particularly fascinates me is that the it is the most poorly designed directories that have the subscribers most vocally opposed to making changes to layout, indexes and overall organization.
The explanation for this is partly that directory users are creatures of habit. Once they are comfortable with how something works, they don't want to have to re-learn the product. There's also a secret club aspect to it -- once users accustom themselves to cryptic codes, unintuitive indexing and arrangement, and non-standard abbreviations, it's as if they've cracked a code and joined a secret society that makes them a little smarter and a little more valuable in their organizations.
Not surprisingly, this passionate preference for the status quo extends to Internet-based directories as well. Unfortunately the ease of making changes to user interfaces has tempted more than one publisher to begin an endless series of "improvements" to their online products, leaving a trail of customer anger and frustration in its wake. On several occasions, I have experienced this myself, finding the online database I logged into on Friday bears no resemblance to the one I logged into on Monday. My first reaction, "why did they mess with something that worked just fine?"
In many cases, publishers have abdicated control over design of their Web products to their IT departments. Good intentions notwithstanding, IT-designed Web sites tend to favor neat and cool over functional an intuitive. This mindset even extends to colors. A professional site designer believes "less is more" in terms of color; a programmer believes that if there are 64 million available color combinations available, as many of them should be used as possible.
Publishers should monitor and discourage gratuitous "upgrades" to their Web sites. Changes to layout, navigation and functionality should be implemented slowly and only after customer testing. Familiarity with your interface is a form of subscriber "lock in," don't throw it away on a whim
Searching for Subscriptions
Yahoo! has announced a beta version of what it calls Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, that allows users to search for content on password-protected, subscription content sites.
By arrangement with publishers (the publishers currently participating are Consumer Reports, Financial Times, Forrester Research, IEEE, New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal), It's being reported that content from Gale, LexisNexis and Factiva is due to be added shortly.
Yahoo! indexes the content and shows a snippet of it in search results. Users then click on a search result link, and they are presented with a page controlled by the publisher that allows users to login (if they are existing subscribers), subscribe online, or in some cases, purchase a specific article or report on a one-off basis. It's an approach that is simple and effective. And it's a model where everybody wins. Users get greater access to so-called "deep Web" content. Publishers with subscription content get more search engine visibility, ultimately leading to more revenue. Yahoo! gets lots of new content under its index, giving it some nice differentiation and competitive advantage (at least for a while).
Best of all, publishers don' have to compromise their business models in any way. Consumer Reports subscribers, for example, can access content directly through the Consumer Reports site, or indirectly through Yahoo!, using the same username and password in both places. The subscription to Consumer Reports is no less valuable to the subscriber because of this arrangement with Yahoo! It's just one more doorway to the same content.
But the most amazing thing about this new service is that it wasn't launched five years ago. Both the idea and the execution are breathtakingly simple, and the underlying technology has been in place for years.
It's the rare subscription-based data publisher who won't benefit from being part of this new service, so run, don't walk over to Yahoo! and get on board now. Even if Yahoo! ultimately starts looking for a revenue share on content sales and new subscriptions, this will probably still be a good financial deal subscription-based publishers. And besides, the faster this new service from Yahoo! grows, the faster Google and all the others will copy it, providing even more low-cost promotional opportunities for subscription-based publishers!
We're pleased to announce that
Richard P. Malloch, President of Hearst Business Media, and
Craig Pisaris-Henderson, Chairman and CEO of Miva Inc.
(formerly FindWhat.com) will be the keynote speakers at InfoCommerce 2005.
InfoCommerce 2005:
Cracking the Quality Conundrum
November 6-8, 2005 - Philadelphia, PA
Thomas Register: The End of the Beginning
There was a very consistent reaction to the news this week that Thomas Publishing was ending the print edition of Thomas Register. I'd characterize it as being "shocked but not surprised."
I think the shock was driven by the symbolism of the decision. When this publishing icon, one of the largest and most successful buying guides of all time, says so clearly that print is passe, we all then have to acknowledge that the future of our industry is online. By now haven't all database publishers acknowledged that their future is online? Yes, but that acknowledgement hasn't always been backed up with action, in part because there is no clear path to get from here to there.
The lack of surprise comes from the fact that Thomas was an early and aggressive player on the Web. At a point in time when the future of online was anything but clear, Thomas made the huge gamble that the value of an online audience would ultimately be worth more than the print subscription revenue it was putting at risk. It won, and it won big. The transition for Thomas has been anything but painless, but by starting so early, it became a major Web destination well before there were even such things as keywords to buy, and that has given it a huge competitive advantage. Also, by starting early, Thomas learned a lot and was able to make some mistakes without incurring much damage, all while hedging its bet by maintaining its print edition and selling a print/online package. If there isn't one already, this would make one amazing business school case study.
Now that Thomas has killed the print version of Thomas Register, there will be a lot of soul searching by the industry with publishers asking themselves whether it's time to discontinue their own print products. While our research says that print will move into a period of accelerating decline over the next 2-5 years, most publishers will find that 20-25% of their customers will continue to prefer print for the foreseeable future. Most publishers can still economically accommodate this market. Thomas, with its 33-volume annual behemoth, was dealing with atypical print economics.
As someone who cut his teeth (and his hands, re-making pages with an X-acto knife) working on the print edition of Thomas Register, I am certainly going to miss those "big green books." At the same time, we are watching a whole new era unfold before our eyes, one where our information and our value are no longer constrained by the limitations of the print format, but only by our imaginations.