Register to see content? Your opinion.
 

I have a friend who is rebuilding a Yahoo Groups style Group site connected to a social network. What I found odd was that the programmer set up the site so you have to register to see the groups, the content... heck practically any of it! I run a number of free sites including 2 social networks, 3 galleries and 2 webdirectories. I require registration to comment or upload but not to view content and I have no idea why anyone would require registration to view content because - well aren't you just limiting your traffic? Opinions will be highly appreciated. Thanks.

probably is losing initial traffic but at the same time building a nice list (of interested people) to email for years to come

The chick on your avatar looks beautiful, Templar. I think she is a computer animation.

There are pros and cons to email registrations.

Pros:
- Collect more information about users
- Send more emails back to registered people

Cons:
- Some users may leave site because registration is a hassle

Never heard any complains about that...

Register to see content? pain in the ass as user pov, and less traffic as admin pov

Thanks for the responses so far.
I pretty much agree with the ongoing sentiment that registration-to-view-content is only useful for collecting email addresses.

Thanks! She's a V4 model from Daz and rendered in Carrera.

funny, we are totally going to redo myfreeones.com. 1 of the biggest things we are moving to is making it all open, so a non member can see all without actually being able to do anything. Right now it is semi-closed. Lets see how this has an impact on daily registrations.

On 1 hand you can say people will sign up cause they can see all they get with that registration. On the other hand people might look at it and think "meh not worth it".

Will be fun to see.