Few read TOSes, not even Paypal’s
Posted by multippt
It’s been a known fact that almost nobody bothers with the manual, until something actually goes wrong. Same with the Terms of Service. A devastating surprise is that only a small amount of PayPal users actually read the TOS before registering a PayPal account. The rest of the users read the TOS after having some problems with PayPal.
A TOS comes with almost every site
When you register an account (or for that matter visit a site), you get entered into a agreement/contract/etc. TOSes are cleverly disguised in several forms, their alternate names come in the form as:
-Terms of Use (okay, maybe not that cleverly disguised)
-EULA
-Policy
-Rules
-Copyright
And, the most favorited place where the TOS would be linked to is usually at the bottom, or even worse - completely inaccessible from the main page unless you click through several pages.
The problem with TOSes
Currently, TOSes are simply words, well hundreds of words. No one wants to read a legal essay whenever they sign up for something, even for something as important as PayPal. No matter how the TOS is decorated (on average, most TOSes use line-breaks, bolding/italics, ALL-CAPS and lists, but that’s only to improve pleasure for reading the TOS), it is still ignored.
A sweet test over at O’Flaherty found that almost no one actually viewed the Terms despite the site being mildly popular. Want another example? PayPal is popular amongst teens, but there’s one problem - PayPal doesn’t permit the “underaged” to register an account in the first place. 2 examples not enough? Google AdSense is another unfortunate target (though that has changed when users found Google to be incredibly compliant with such terms).
In addition, using some nice stats on this site, the amount of page-views on the policy page is about 4% of that of the front page, and that was even with advertising that throuhout the site (not just at the footer).
Should TOSes be different?
The problem with a long TOS is that no one is going to read it. However, the problem with a short piece of legal text means that you will not have all the “protection” you need. A solution to both? Have a summary. Or, even better, spruce them up with colors to draw attention to some important places (do formal stuff need to be always black and white?).
The most read TOSes?
A search on “terms of service” across several search engines yields some interesting results. Why search for such a thing on search engines? You see, terms are likely to rank up higher if they are more linked to, are highly accessible and relevant right? Right. So by this theory plus a little background diging on who has the “best” TOSes (they have to read it to know it is the best anyway…), the following would be the more read and exposed TOSes, sorted by alphabetical order:
-AIM/AOL [well, maybe not on registration anyway]
-Google [don't forget that Google's privacy policy went under news spotlight as well]
-Paypal and EBay [Most read doesn't mean many users read it]
-SecondLife
-Yahoo
