Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Why Does It Have to Be That Way?

March 13th, 2009

Instead of defending a “rule”, ask why it has to be that way.

This morning on Twitter, @cheeky_geeky complained that it was too much hassle to reset the password on his Washington Post account.  @washingtonpost ‘s reply was basically a defensive, You have to log in on other sites too, why are you picking on us?

Is that productive?  No.

The truth is, they need logged-in users because having some demographic data makes you a more valuable audience member to sell ads to.  I think most users are okay with that – we know you have to sell ads.

So the question might be, how else could we get information about this user?  Maybe, instead of logging in, you ask the user to answer 3 quick demographic questions.  Voila! Now you know something about them, your advertisers know something about them, and they can proceed to read your content without a lot of hassle.

@washingtonpost could propose a solution like this over Twitter, and get real user validation within minutes.  It would take time to put this into action, but it would be a step in the right direction.

It might even go further: what if their loyal users were willing to share more demographic data about themselves?  Faced with the very real threat that their favorite publications will go away entirely, at least some visitors will be willing to share their zip code and profession.  Is it enough? Who knows?  But no one will know unless someone starts asking.

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  • http://www.noozit.com/author/David+W.+Locke David Locke

    Amazon managed to track users and maintain session without logging in. It did take dynamic page generation to make that happen. But, you didn’t have to log in.

    Logging in was necessary when online newpapers were not free, or when you wanted premium content. As that business model didn’t prove out, they didn’t get rid of the code supporting the business model.

    Then, you have to ask if the newspaper is still using those demographic identifiers? Are they still being a print newspaper relative to those demographics? Did they ever move to a links, server logs, and webanalytics?

    But, no. That response certainly is awful, and counterproductive.

  • http://www.searchtools.com Avi Rappoport

    You are right, it’s an extra step for reading that shouldn’t be necessary.

    That said, there’s even a cross-network solution, which is OpenID. Essentially, you identify yourself from where ever else you happen to be. The interfaces are awful so far, but the idea rocks. I’ll tell you that I’m me on Facebook, but not on Linkedin, etc.

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