Content Gating - Benefits and Drawbacks

Content Gating - Benefits and Drawbacks

Content Gating is basically the type of content you can't access unless you give some personal details out like your name, email, social media profiles, etc.
Why would you publish gated content on your website? Well, gated content can help you gain very detailed leads which you can use in various forms to increase your earnings by targeting very specific audiences, you will never get this type of control with free content.

The Benefits:

• Very effective outreach to people that are interested in your product;
  
• Your content once accessed will be perceived as valuable and important, people may share it directly with their friends and family, the value things works better if you offer a PDF;
  
• You will have a lot of information on everyone that accesses your content.
  

The Drawbacks:

• Few people will go through the trouble of writing several lines of personal information just to get their hands on your content. The content itself must be insanely high quality having details and maybe statistics find nowhere else;
  
• You will gain no off-page SEO benefits because practically no one will link to a gated content;
  
• You may get some people and customers upset because you are restricting content;
  
• You will not rank with this content because you won't have anything of value to offer Google.
  

What do you think of gated content? Have you ever done this? Do you think the benefits outrank the negative aspects?