[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.