[grkvlt]

Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...

[lokedhs]

Yes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.

[parrellel]

Eventually, Google threatened to delist them if they didn't provide the content somewhere on the page.