Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Changes to Globe & Mail website access

I was just reviewing an article on the Globe & Mail website and wanted to send an e-mail of it to someone else. It appears the Globe now requires registration (albeit free) for using their "e-mail" and "print" features. They say that it is for the purposes of monitoring how their website is used; however, since their major competitor the National Post made most of their articles pay-per-view I wonder if the Globe is evaluating similar positioning?

While I haven't minded so much registering for free access on the New York Times website, for some reason I find this more offensive. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is because the pop up registration page was poorly created and I cannot actually access the whole page to fill in the form? Perhaps the Times put a lot more value into their product and so I don't mind giving a little something back in return? More likely it is because I already have subscriptions to the Globe at both home and work so have more of a sense of entitlement. I'm likely not the only one--it's going to be hard for them to change this sort of attitude I think.

1 comment:

Connie Crosby said...

I just discovered the Toronto Star has a similar new policy.