177: Stop registration wall cheaters

What good is it if someone signs up for your site with their junk email address?

Let’s make things overly simple and divide the “how to monetize your website” question into three options.

Free, supported by ads
Registration wall
Paywall

There are a lot more options, but bear with me.

Each of these models has challenges. If you choose “free, supported by ads,” people can use ad blockers. They can register with their junk email address. And there are ways to get past paywalls. There’s no perfect solution. But maybe we can make them better.

You can detect ad blockers and respond with a polite request to turn it off, or you can simply disallow browsers that have ad blockers. There are a range of options.

But I want to focus on registration walls, because I don’t think we pay enough attention to this one.

The main benefit of a registration wall is that you capture an email address which you can monetize in lots of different ways. But the user can give you a junk email, or they can give you their good email address and unsubscribe from your messages.

Why put up with that? It’s analogous to someone subscribing with a bad credit card.

If you’re going to limit access to registered users, why not enforce that and insist that the email associated with that registration is deliverable and shows some engagement?

This requires an integration between your registration function and your email service provider. This would be a relatively easy use case in a Customer Data Platform. If you’re not sure how to do it, give me a call.