Legal Commentary

Why paywalls are counter productive #fail

By David Canton

There are many reasons why paywalls are a bad idea – here’s one that happened to me.

A reporter for a specialty magazine interviewed me recently about some pending legislation.  The article was to be published now – so I checked the website.  The site shows an image of the front page of the current edition – which has the article at the very top of the page.    Beside that image is a list of articles from the publication.

But when I click on it – it just gives me a message saying I need to be a subscriber or registered as a guest.  Normally, I would stop there and not bother – but since I was interviewed for the article, I decide its worth the pain of registering as a guest.   So I answer all their questions (none of them were privacy invasive – but a pain to do) and get signed up.

So I log on and click on the article link – only to get a message saying:

“You do not have sufficient permission to view the article requested. To gain full access to all articles please click here to take advantage of our low introductory offer.”

I guess they don’t want people to actually read their publication.  How many people that find them online are actually going to buy a subscription?

By insisting that people buy subscriptions to see even a small part of their publication, they prevent casual readers from seeing it at all.     Assuming I liked the article, I would have mentioned it on my blog and linked to it, bringing more attention to their publication.

And yes, I realize  that the attention I would bring is not in itself significant (I’m not Techdirt or Boing Boing), but every bit helps, and every bit adds up.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on May 05, 2010 (boomark / email).