[jonnathanson]

It's inconvenient for us, but I wouldn't necessarily call it "absurd." The Wall Street Journal is not a 501(c). It's either this, or a flurry of intrusive ads. (Or a subscription upsell, but I digress). Different publications pick their poison differently. But someone's gotta pay for something.

Besides, paywalls aren't hard to circumvent. Someone usually posts a redirect within minutes of these articles' being linked here.

[irollboozers]

Surely someone at WSJ is wondering "Hey, this article is doing really well in organic search. Our numbers are up, great job everyone."

[jonnathanson]

I'm not a paywall advocate, fwiw. I think it's a suboptimal monetization strategy that often directly conflicts with distribution and UX. That said, I don't think it's ipso facto ridiculous. There are better ways to monetize, but not monetizing is not an option for WSJ.

[bduerst]

Unless they use referral page to identify aggregators (Reddit, Digg, HN, etc.) as a specific channel.

For a news website you would hope they do, otherwise their marketing dept isn't doing a very good job.

[baddox]

It's absurd in the context of social norms and expectations. A restaurant isn't a 501(c) either, but I would call it absurd if they charged a customer to use the restroom.

[jonnathanson]

Respectfully, I'm not sure I follow the analogy. A restaurant's core business is serving food, and a restaurant charges for food. The Journal's core business is journalism, and it charges for journalism. Content isn't the "restroom" of the WSJ's business model.

As I've stated in a comment further down this tree, I don't like paywalls. I think they're an inefficient and suboptimal means of monetizing content. A paywall is basically a tax on readers who aren't savvy enough to bypass it. If you look at the economics of a paywall, it's basically monetizing the intersection of two sets of people: 1) the set of all people who really want to read the WSJ, and 2) the set of all people who can't get around a paywall when they encounter one. This intersection cohort -- call it "People who like WSJ and can't navigate paywalls" -- is probably a decent size, but it leaves a lot of would-be customers on the table. At the same time, the paywall hampers distribution and creates a bad user experience. It's an unsophisticated way to monetize content. That said, I don't find it "absurd." Bad, sure. Annoying, absolutely. "Absurd," no. Nor do I find absurdity in the premise that the WSJ should attempt to monetize its content.

[eru]

Can't, or don't want the hassle.

[tonyarkles]

I'm pretty sure that when I was in Paris, it cost $0.25 or $0.50 to use the restroom at McDonalds. Which, to be honest, made me feel better about walking in, using their restroom, and carrying on without purchasing a meal :)

[IgorPartola]

I bet they were cleaner for it too.

[privong]

> A restaurant isn't a 501(c) either, but I would call it absurd if they charged a customer to use the restroom.

The cost of the restroom visit is, in a sense, folded into the cost of the meal. That is why many restaurants only allow paying customers to use the restrooms.

[mikeash]

Since when do social norms and expectations involve getting journalists' work for free? This basically never happened as little as twenty years ago, and everybody was fine with it. I don't think norms have changed so quickly.

[baddox]

> Since when do social norms and expectations involve getting journalists' work for free?

That's a false dichotomy. Websites for major news outlets have always been overwhelming "free" (as in, not behind a paywall, but they obviously try to monetize through ads).

[mikeash]

Yes, but the web is an extremely recent phenomenon relative to journalism in general, and journalism has historically been something where you had to pay to read.

[baddox]

That's true, but the medium's social norms tend to be stronger than the content's social norms. After all, the vast majority of web pages are free to view, and yet all the types of content on them were traditionally paid (because, for one thing, prior to the Internet most content was much more expensive to deliver).