So, it's working for the tech-savvy using these little hacks, right? That means a certain article is going to gain traction, get people talking on social networking sites, and in turn seduce more people into wanting in on those discussions. But the people who aren't in on these hacks are met with a dilemma: be a part of the in-crowd, or just go away. As it turns out, this human wanting to be in on what everyone else is talking about is very strong, so a lot of people end up buying it. For others, it's the convenience factor of not having to google every article and find it that way... in both cases, a key force was the content not being totally unaccessible, but being there in some small way as a teaser. I should point out that it's working out exceeding well for the NYTimes. WSJ has been doing it for a long time, and the Economist just recently started doing it too. I expect even more will soon follow. It's an interesting and clever evolution of the freemium model in some ways.
Google basically requires that sites show the Google crawler what the user will see when they click the link. Showing Google the content-less paywall page would be Google-suicide, so instead they show the article if your referrer is Google.
So, it's working for the tech-savvy using these little hacks, right? That means a certain article is going to gain traction, get people talking on social networking sites, and in turn seduce more people into wanting in on those discussions. But the people who aren't in on these hacks are met with a dilemma: be a part of the in-crowd, or just go away. As it turns out, this human wanting to be in on what everyone else is talking about is very strong, so a lot of people end up buying it. For others, it's the convenience factor of not having to google every article and find it that way... in both cases, a key force was the content not being totally unaccessible, but being there in some small way as a teaser. I should point out that it's working out exceeding well for the NYTimes. WSJ has been doing it for a long time, and the Economist just recently started doing it too. I expect even more will soon follow. It's an interesting and clever evolution of the freemium model in some ways.