WSJ Pay Wall is a joke
It’s well known that you can access complete WSJ articles via Google News which you can’t access directly when navigating their own site. Not quite sure of the rationale for this but to make it easier to access complete articles you can use the following bookmarklet to find the URL for complete articles on wsj.com…
Find WSJ article <– drag this link to your browser bookmarks bar
How to:
- Drag that bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks bar
- When you find yourself on a wsj.com page looking at a article stub, just highlite some of the article text with your cursor then click the bookmarklet
- The bookmarklet will then execute a site search on wsj.com looking for pages which mention the highlited text specifically. Invariably it will find the URL for the complete article
Really makes you wonder about the purpose of ‘hiding’ the full article in the first place. With all the talk they’ve been making recently about the paywall I fully expect them to close this loop hole anytime.
Thats funny, because I recently found a similar workaround on the Financial Times website. I used to have an online subscription but then they jacked up the renewal fees and I moved departments so I no longer do, although I do still receive daily news alerts. Without a subscription they only allow access to a limited number of articles per month, however once I’ve used those up I found that if I just paste the article name into google and then click the search link through to their website they allow me full access to the article. Its quite weird because I would have thought they used cookies to monitor how many articles I’d accessed…
Here’s my theory: this is a way for them to get visibility (hence more virality) to people who won’t pay anyways, while collecting a cluelessness tax on current subscribers.
This can only work when the existing subscriber base is majoritarily clueless web-wise, which I surmise is still the case so far for FT and WSJ subscribers.
Hey Seb, it’s been awhile…’cluelessness tax’, I love it. Not much of a biz model though eh.
The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think that the half-life of most business models will be getting shorter and shorter.
Every time your customers get organized / clued in, you have to invent a new one. In other words, it will be harder and harder to capitalize on inefficiencies over the long term because they will get spotted ever more quickly and you’ll get disrupted.
From this point of view, the best horses to bet on from a business standpoint are those where it will take the public a long time to get untied / get a clue / take the power to change things. Areas like energy, law, medicine, perhaps…
What do you think?
…. and areas where you serve people with deep pockets who won’t look for alternatives because it’s pocket change to them anyhow.