Scott Karp wonders about the ROI for registration walls at the Times (and other newspapers):

When NYTimes.com ran the numbers on TimesSelect, they decided that the lost traffic, particularly from search, and the associated lost ad revenue outweighed the revenue from paid subscriptions. I wonder whether they’ve run the same analysis for the registration wall.

This is something a lot of companies try to do too - "download this free whitepaper" is what you see, but the link goes to a registration form. I suspect that an honest analysis of click throughs would demonstrate a huge loss of volume. And no, the people who do fill in the form are probably not "leads" that are worth anything. A decent proportion are bogus data with email addresses that are no longer checked (I fill in a fair number of forms that way myself).

If people are coming to your site for information, give it to them. If they are truly interested, guess what? They'll come back. Having a sales person call or email as a follow up to a form fill is probably an irritation - did you enjoy your last interaction with a telemarketer? What makes you think people will enjoy yours any better than you enjoy others?

There are very, very few "you can only get it from us" products at this point. If you want to sell yours, you have to make it easy to try out. That's why we try to make our product download straightforward.

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