[AlbertCory]

One point to my others and pretty orthogonal to them:

I was a tech assistant in Google Patent Litigation. Part of my job was to bust patents (a dream job, right?), and for that, I would scour the Internet for literature to invalidate a patent being asserted against us.

I would constantly see articles behind some paywall, and I would never, never click through. There are reasons you can imagine, like (1) I didn't want the hassle of justifying the expense, and (2) I hate those publishers. Both true.

However, the biggest reason was:

I don't know if it's any good until I read it.

The vast majority of articles are not helpful for my purpose. I can't tell if they really are until I read them. If it turns out that some article is the killer, then of course Google would pay for it. But for the 1000's that are not -- well, why waste the money? I can almost always find the same information somewhere else, for free.