Leaky Wall

The route by which non-subscribers get free access to The Wall Street Journal’s online content.

In a recent analysis of the future of The Times, David Carr argued that if advertising revenue fails to return to prerecession levels, “newsgathering will require additional participation from the consumer, which is why there is a great deal of talk about subscriptions and micropayments.”

Carr observed:

Finding the sweet spot between protecting the newspaper’s digital ad sales and extracting additional subscription revenue is paramount. The Financial Times has a metered model, which means the reader can have access to a certain amount of content before being asked for a credit card. The Wall Street Journal has a so-called leaky wall, which allows nonsubscribers to search their way to content, but more than a million subscribers, including me, pay what constitutes a kind of convenience charge.

Blogging about the Journal’s leaky wall, in March 2008, Farhad Manjoo explained:

The system works like this: If you click on a subscriber-only WSJ link from an ordinary Web site – say, a link that I post here, or a link from within the Journal’s own site – you’ll be sent to a limited version of the article, and you’ll be asked to log in to read the whole thing.

But if you click on a link to that same article in Google News, you’ll be sent to the full story for free. This is true, also, of WSJ links on Digg, and probably a few other big referral sites, too.

Manjoo deemed this system evidence that the WSJ “wants people to come to its site for free – if it didn’t, it wouldn’t give readers of Digg and Google News full access to its articles.” And argued:

The Journal no longer really has a pay wall.* It’s a pay curtain, useless and flimsy, and you’re committing no transgression in dancing around it.

* A pay wall is an article preview page that ask users to provide a subscriber password, or to pay a fee, in order to proceed to the full content.

(On 10 May, The Financial Times reported: “News Corp is planning to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal’s Web site this year.”)