- ClickZ, Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11 AM
Perhaps "co-registration"--the process of asking users to sign up for offers from third parties during or after registration--is no longer the dirty word it used to be five years ago, writes Dan
Felter, the CEO of Opt-Intelligence, an online lead generation company, which is another word for co-registration. At its worst, co-registration is an excuse to dump aggregated partner data on someone
else. Felter uses the example of a Web site that gets about thousand sign-ups a day suddenly delivering 70,000 leads in one weekend. As a consumer, did you ever wonder where all that spam comes from?
Well, a site that suddenly delivers those numbers is probably involved in something sketchy, like a ring of sites that force users to opt-out of third-party offers--or worse, hiding the opt-out
process from unsuspecting users altogether. Last year, co-reg revenues grew 290 percent to 753 million, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau--likely growing to $1 billion this year. That, by
the way, is the largest percent increase of any online segment last year. How come co-reg no longer conjures up images of spam in marketer's heads? Felter and others say it's because major players
have cleaned up their acts, and while co-reg specialists might say you need to employ a company like theirs to generate leads for partners in a tasteful way, you could get far enough by making a
common-sense list of what not to do when it comes to your third party offerings: don't trick users into opting-in, don't use opt-outs, don't hit them with too many offers, don't offer free stuff, and
use caution with pre-checked boxes.
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