Pet peeve. Asking for my DOB on registration unnecessarily

As the post title suggests I’ve got a pet peeve in being requested to enter my date of birth on registration for a random website. Some sites could legitimately need my date of birth. Like my bank for example.

Many more sites don’t require it, but ask anyway.

Its often written that the more you ask a user to commit at the beginning whilst registering, the less likely they are to complete your registration.

The site below asked for my DOB with no obvious reason to. On seeing that I decided to navigate away from the site.

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What could the site do differently?

If they genuinely require my date of birth, then they could explain for what reason. Are they going to send me a gift on my birthday? Do I need to be a certain age to view the content of the site?

If they don’t need it then they should remove the field, as it becomes a barrier to sign up.

Apart from that, the sign up form isn’t bad at all although I’m not necessarily sure that a username is necessary, when they have my email address. It would be another thing to remember. They could just ask me to login with my email address, and display my firstname and initial as a username.

I’m pretty confident that these simple changes would improve the number of signups they receive.

Outside of the registration process, they could work a bit harder to convince me of the value of their service before asking me to commit through signup. A demo would’ve been a good option to do this.

Let me first start playing with their site, then ask me to sign up. Not the other way around.