SacBee.com is awful

Today's "vent" of the day. My wife forwarded me the link for an article. And this is my reply to her, with a CC to the Sacramento Bee:
The next time you want to forward an article from SacBee.com, just copy it and paste it into the message. The SacBee.com site basically SUCKS.

All content is password protected, requiring one to register. I understand why from a marketing perspective capturing visitor information is important, among other things for reporting demographics and such to advertisers. However, it's a real pain.

I have been a registered user of SacBee.com for a while, but I rarely visit the site, and rarely remember username or password, tried several times to recall what obvious combo it might have been, and basically gave up. Maybe they have cookies, but I clean those out pretty frequently.

The Bee should find other means of incentivizing registration. In this age of bloggers linking promiscuously to content, they're going to avoid sites like the Bee's that are overly protective of content. They'll go to sites like the San Francisco Chronicle (lessor paper, better site, with archived content) or the LA Times, or whatever. This registration thing also inhibits search engine spiders/robots, further diminishing traffic to SacBee.com.

Online advertisers want "Eyeballs". That means traffic. The Bee's barriers to easy traffic access seem rather stupid, frankly. But whom am I to say. I only do a little online marketing...

Cheers,

Pablo
And yes, this posting is directed "Register@sacbee.com" whoever that
may be, more than you, beloved spouse.

--- Marianne Skoczek wrote:
Going to the blogs: http://www.sacbee.com/136/story/31704.html