The Guardian Introduces “The Registration Wall” To Collect First Party Data
Google and Apple have already initiated the process of discarding the third-party cookies, in their browsers. Similarly, The Guardian is asking people to sign-in, to help build the first-party data strategy.
The Guardian, in December, has initiated a testing model for its “Registration Wall”, including the only selected audience. This was shared in a post, by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, who is also a chief product officer at The Guardian.
According to him the goal of the testing is to portray more relevant advertisement to the customer and readers, this will also provide financial stability to the publishers.
The post started, “Asking readers to sign in provides us with more information that we can use to personalize our approach in asking for support, to serve advertising (with readers’ consent) and to create a better user experience.”
When a reader clicks on an article, an option to register for free appears on the screen. The user can opt for a “Not now” option if the user is not interested.
In the case of the user register, they get the perk of posting comments, exclusive access to the editorial section, and they can also opt for gift cards and discounts.
This helps the publishers to understand user preferences. The user and publishers can keep a track of the number of articles read by the user in a month.
Alice Pickthall, a senior analyst at Enders says, that it is a good job. “Registration is part of the funnel to growing reader engagement and donations while improving advertising quality and targeting so the benefit will be twofold to both strands of revenue.”
Registration walls collect the first-party data, this helps them to empower the content choice of the audience. It also, increase the accuracy of ad-targeting.
Even newspapers like the New York Times, Tribune Publishing, Hearst Newspapers are considering to implement registration walls on their websites.
With the help of registration walls, the publishers can have a better understanding of the users’ psych and therefore, they can target the ads according to the user preferences.
The Registration Wall leads publishers to a ten times higher conversion rate, as reported by the subscription platform Piano.
According to Thomas Beakdal, a media analyst, the first-party data helps to retain the customer, “You can’t do good churn analysis without first-party data.”
Even, the first-party data helps to increase the number of subscribers.
According to Nordic publisher Schibsted, an increase of subscribers was noticed when they analyzed their first-party data and understood the reason behind the cancellation journey of their users.
As the concept of third-party cookies is dying, the publishers’ community must build a first-party database. It will help publishers like Vox, Business Insiders and The Washington Posts in sustaining their businesses.
A registration wall will help publishers to collect details like email, phone number, name etc. helping them efficiently targeting their audience.
In just one year of installing registration wall on their website, The New York Times swears to never use third-party cookies for advertising.
The Guardian intends to provide a wonderful journalism experience to their audiences. They don’t want to compromise on it at any end. They feel that it’s a civic right of a human to get accurate information during these tough times of pandemic. The introduction of the registration wall is another step in that direction.
Online news platforms are experiencing heavy traffic on their website. Although, the revenue generated by advertisement is pretty low.
It’s astonishing that in March, The Guardian experienced a record-breaking user interaction on its unique browser. Since February, the number doubled and reached toa recorded of 336 million. As in February, this number was recorded to be 191 million.
Both, the number of daily visitors, and weekly visitors on the website have increased. In October 2019, The Guardian set a record of the maximum number of readers with some 750 million. This year in March 2020, it broke its record by reaching some 2.17 billion.
However, the data showed that The Guardian in the U.K experienced a downfall of the user database in April 2020. In March 2020, the number of readers was 35.7 million. In April it dropped down to 34.7 million. Still, it’s great when compared to February 2019, 25.6M unique readers.
Due to Covid-19, the publishers have seen a decrease in spent on advertisements. There is a downfall of 65% on the spent.
However, The Guardian is all set to achieve 2M paying supporters by the year 2022.
