The WSJ’s Permeable Pay Wall

I was reading a post from Jeff Jarvis on Rupert’s pay wall, when it occurred to me that not everyone knows all of the details of how it works.  It’s not as hard of a pay wall as the Times Select put up a few years back.  Both walls cover only some of the content, but there are a few situations where the WSJ lets anyone in.

The WSJ content is either flagged as Subscriber Content, which has a small key next to the headline, or is open to anyone.  However Subscriber Content is available to anyone if you are referred from one of the following sites:

• Google (news or search, anything Google.com, but not GMail)
• MySpace
• Digg
• Marketwatch
• Barrons (online.barrons.com)

I checked a host of other aggregators and search engines:  Bing, MSN, Yahoo, ShashDot, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Mixx, Newsvine, Facebook, Fark, Reddit, Drudge Report, and so on.  Nothing else hit.  MySpace, Marketwatch, and Barrons are easy to explain, they’re all News Corp. properties.  The New York Post, and other News Corp. properties, don’t get a pass.  Digg is probably the lone aggregator because it drives a lot of traffic, and was head-and-shoulders above similar sites back when they set the pay wall rules.  Those rules could probably use some revisiting.  Why Google but not Bing?  They don’t have a special relationship with Google, so I don’t see a reason to discriminate.

Occasionally you will see something labeled Subscriber Content which has been opened to everyone.  For example, I found a popular WSJ article on Twitter that is labelled Subscriber Content which can be read in full even if you aren’t a subscriber.  How that happens I’m not sure.  Perhaps if a subscriber shares a link for some protected content, they might decide to make it free, either automatically or by alerting a human.  The Drudge Report frequently links to WSJ articles, but surveying a few days of links I couldn’t find examples of Subscriber Content being linked to.  Although I would wager that if Drudge did link to Subscriber Content, they’d open it up.

So the WSJ has a permeable pay wall.  Jeff’s point about not getting as much Googlejuice is a good one, but I doubt the WSJ is losing out on much.  They’ve probably had a high rank from the day Google launched, and enough links around the web that their rank won’t be falling anytime soon.  They certainly loose out on some traffic by not giving bloggers and newer social networking sites the same pass as Digg and MySpace.

How much are they losing?  Who knows.  Looking at referer data from compete.com and alexa.com, they don’t look too different from their peers.  Their traffic has been steadily increasing.  In fact, they’ve done a better job at adding pageviews than the NYTimes, which is down based on Alexa stats, and flat based on compete.com.

What does that tell me?  There are other important drivers of web traffic than just whether you have a pay wall.  Hmm, maybe it has something to do with quality, and Rupert is on to something.