Fox News Is Asking For Users' Emails, Leading Some to Abandon the Website

Digital news sites have never been money-making machines, which is why many have gone behind paywalls. Sites like The New York Times and The Washington Post now require readers to have a subscription if they want to read more than a couple of articles.

While there are still some places where you can just find the news essentially for free, those places are now fewer and farther between. Recently, some Fox News users have noticed that the site is now asking them for their emails. Here's what we know about what prompted this change, and why some users are so upset over it.

Fox News is likely asking for user emails for the same reason that most news sites ask users to register. Namely, they want to better track user's behavior on the site, which will allow them to provide those users with more targeted advertising. It also gives them a chance to promote their articles via email, and creates a more consistent interaction between individual users and the site.

While Fox is not yet asking users to fork over any money, this step suggests that getting user emails will help them better understand who their audience is and how to better monetize interactions with them.

At the same time, asking users to verify their emails confirms that those who are coming to the site are in fact real people, and aren't bots. This gives Fox a firmer sense of how much of its traffic is from actual users.

Although Fox may have good reasons for asking for user's emails, there are plenty of regular Fox News users who would rather not give that information out to anyone who doesn't absolutely need it.

"No thank you — just went to CNN and got the same information for free," one person wrote on Reddit. "This is ridiculous and a bad move on their part. When did they start this crap?"

"Not doing it either. Their app is bad anyway as it always takes you back to the top of the main page forcing you to scroll all the way back down to where you were. BAD MOVE FOX," another person added.

While the move might still be worth it if Fox can more firmly establish connections with its loyal users, it's clear that some people are outraged over the change.

Fox has long catered to an audience that values things like privacy, so it makes sense that many of them would be unwilling to fork over an email address, even for a site that they trust. The reality, though, is that it's going to be harder and harder to find good news sites that don't require some sort of registration at the bare minimum.

The era when everything on the internet was free is already over. Fox News seems to have made a small step toward that reality, and it's one that its users don't like.