For years we’ve been reading The New York Post online every day to get our fill of celebrity gossip, Manhattan crime stories and big, big headlines.
So we were somewhat surprised Tuesday to find that The Post had locked all their content behind a registration system. And although it was unexpected, it wasn’t that much given most sites are cutting over to reg to improve their bottom line.
What was a surprise was how poorly the paper handled the whole process. We’re assuming they had some idea of their Web traffic and how many registration requests they would receive on their first day. Actually, maybe they didn’t as they apparently devoted a corrupt NT box run by a half-dead hamster with a thyroid condition to processing the requests. You’d get through the reg process only to be told the site was experiencing heavy traffic and, you know, try again later.
Few got registered the first day, a fact that was amusingly chronicled by needle-sharp, foul-mouthed media skewerers Gawker here and here.
Now what’s interesting today is we finally have our free account registered only to find they haven’t gated off their lead story and Page Six. We’ll assume they’ve left some sports free to the masses, too. Everything was gated on Tuesday, so either they rethought their decision on locking away their most popular content or everything was truly messed up Tuesday.
So, what’s the bottom line? If you run a registered site or will in the future, take heart, you probably won’t screw it up as much as The Post.
