[notduncansmith]

Just out of curiosity, what is it about pay-walls that you hate so much?

I don't hate them (my wallet does, when the content I want is behind them of course), but I find it to be a pretty reasonable model. Have a bite of the content, if you enjoy it then pay for the rest. It doesn't seem crazy to me that people should be compensated for their work, and while the "pay what you want" model is a lovely ideal, some people are more comfortable putting a fixed price on it.

I'm not asking to be combative, I'm genuinely curious on whether or not you have a better solution, and I'm totally open to having my opinion of pay-walls changed if I've overlooked some flaw in that model.

[cwyers]

The paradox of paywalls is that content you have to pay for is less valuable than content you get for free. The ability to link to and from a page is a tremendous value-add in the web; a paywall breaks the chain of links. If an article is behind a paywall, I can read it, but I can't Tweet it to all my followers and expect they can read it, I can't link to it from my blog and expect all my readers to get the context... sharing is a fundamental feature for the web and paywalls break it.

There IS a case where paywalls work and work well -- if some of the value in the information is information asymmetry. This is why the Wall Street Journal works better behind a paywall than the New York Times does -- the audience for the WSJ is a bunch of people who deal in investing, where the value sometimes isn't in merely being informed but being more informed than the others.