Sneaking Around the WSJ.com Paywall

The Wall Street Journal online edition is the poster child for the argument in favor of paid subscriptions for news Web sites. WSJ.com has 400,000 paid online subscribers (hundreds of thousands more get the site along with their print subscription), giving other publishers hope that some way, somehow, someday, they can charge for online content.

Well, I ditched my WSJ.com subscription last month, after almost 15 years (I was a charter subscriber, in fact). Why? At $155 a year, it was just too expensive—even as a business-expense writeoff, which btw is a major reason why WSJ.com is an outlier in the online-subscription argument. 

Insanely, I could only reduce the cost of the annual subscription if I agreed to receive the printed Journal, as well. (Yes, you read that right.) Then I'd just pay $99 a year. The wacky logic of this continues to escape me, and I just don't want that newsprint piling up in the recycling bin, untouched. So I canceled.

And I haven't missed a thing.

This is the dark secret, and the Achilles heel, of the Journal's—and Rupert Murdoch's—paid-content business model aspirations. It turns out that most of the key content of the supposedly for-pay Journal is available online for, um, free. And it's not hard to find. No, Google isn't stealing it, nor is some aggregator. It's all sitting right there on the WSJ.com site, if you know where to find it. Hiding in plain sight (or site), as it were.

This isn't rocket science. Basically, I just had to change a couple of my longstanding Journal URLs. It turns out that about half the paper—especially the excellent "soft" features in Personal Journal and Weekend Journal, among the WSJ's best content—is readily available on the WSJ site, unprotected by the paywall, for some reason. (You'd think that's the kind of unique stuff they'd want to charge for.) The best of the Journal's technology coverage, including Walt Mossberg's computer column, is free on Mossberg's affiliated site, AllThingsD. 

My most personalized use of WSJ.com, the stock portfolio (and related news coverage of specific companies) is on the "free" side of the WSJ.com paywall, though it's easily replaceable elsewhere. Even the legendary Wall Street Journal a-heds—the quirky, eminently readable front-page features that have been sadly diminished under Murdoch—are on the free side of the WSJ.com paywall.

And just about everything else—even breaking stories—can be found...well, I won't give it away. But it involves using Google in a quite obvious way. OK, I've lost access to the WSJ archives—but I rarely used that feature anyway. 

In sum, life without a paid subscription to the Wall Street Journal turns out to be not much different than it was when Dow Jones was dinging my credit card for ever larger dollar amounts every year. And I've now got a spare $155 to blow on iPad apps (though not the Journal's!).

All of this, of course, assumes that the financial and business coverage that the Journal provides is so unique that anyone should be paying for it. Sometimes, that's true—when the Journal is at its best on business stories, there's little better. But huge amounts of what the Journal covers—the daily flotsam and jetsam of corporate news, numbers, reports, etc., is available all over the Web, on sites like Yahoo Finance, or from CNBC's excellent—and free—iPhone app. 

Besides, the Journal feels less and less like the Journal anymore, anyway. Increasingly, as Murdoch pursues his war of attrition with The New York Times, the Journal is devoting more and more attention and space to non-business national and international stories that are widely available elsewhere. Problem is, there's really nothing that unique about the Journal's coverage of the oil spill, or the Kagan nomination, or the British election (or New York City). There are countless free sources to replace or substitute for them. 

This, of course, is the deepest flaw in any online-subscription theory: that equivalent coverage is available for free, a click or two away. Even the Journal can't enforce the kind of exclusivity that would make it worth paying for—it's too easy to look elsewhere. And by pursuing his Times-killing strategy—which is nonetheless fascinating in its own right—Murdoch is watering down the product that I previously was happy to pay for.

So I'm no longer a subscriber to WSJ.com. But I'm still a reader. That will make the advertisers happy, I suppose. But somehow it shouldn't be so easy.

One last thing: When I called Dow Jones customer service to cancel my WSJ.com subscription, the response was, simply, "OK, thanks." HUH? You're losing a paying customer, people. At minimum you should ask why—and try to convince me to stay on. But nope, there was zero objection. Nada. Nothing. Same thing happened when I canceled my print subscription to The Washington Post a few years back (and I've encountered other folks who've had the same experience canceling The Post and other papers). 

Memo to newspapers: When losing customers is a critical problem, you might want to try a little harder to keep them from simply leaving, OK? You shouldn't let them go without a fight—or at least a discount offer. Then again, I'd assumed that I'd allow myself to be lured back to WSJ.com by an inevitable (I think) discount pitch after a few months as a non-subscriber. Now, after seeing what I can get without paying for it, I'm not so sure.

Comments

[twitter.com/williampietri]

Should they really try to stop people from leaving? It seems like down that road lies the madness that AOL became notorious for, where you had to argue endlessly just to cancel. That may slow the bleeding, but it can only mask problems, not solve them.

I'd rather see them just ask. It'd be great if their top people each took a few of those calls every week. And then followed up a couple of months later to see how people were getting on.

[Greg Spira]

Your experience parallels mine almost exactly. I was a subscriber to the online Journal for more than a decade. But their annual subscription price went way up while the number of articles I'm interested in reading plunged. And I have no problem getting access to any individual article I want to read anyway. So I cancelled my subscription last year.

[Trendcetera]

I've also found loopholes in paywalls. Normally I would feel bad doing this, as I too am a journalist, but when the pub is owned by a major conglomerate--not so. Most companies' pay walls are not effective. If you copy & paste the headline and put it in Google, lusually the first result is from that original source and clicking on it there will release full copy. This works whether or not it's been cached yet. Only a few trade pubs have been successful in creating good pay walls that are tech sound.

[Localseoguide]

Pretty amazing how flimsy WSJ's paywall is. That said, most people would probably not go to the extra effort to get around it, particularly per Mark's point, since most of the material is available elsewhere anyhow.

[LBY3]

Are you being facetious about not understanding the subscription being cheaper with a print adjunct?

Your eyeballs on print ads are worth a lot more to advertisers still than they are on digital ads. So much so that they're willing to subsidize the cost of your subscription if you boost their print eyeball numbers.

It's an irritating reminder that we're stuck between business models, but it's perfectly logical for this point in time.

[Mark Potts]

Of course I understand the reason they're pushing print. But it's fairly pointless, since my eyeballs would almost never look at the print product--it would go straight into the recycling bin. And I'm not a big fan of trying to sell customers something they don't want. I don't buy the logic of losing a paying customer altogether in the interest of pushing an unwanted product.

[Dbenk]

I have two question/comments:

1. Could you tell us where you get the $99 offer?

2. One can get the archive through Factiva and other services to which many of us have access through various means.

[Donn Friedman]

It is not that hard to steal six packs of beer from the convenience store either: Thugs walk in and do it all the time.
It is just wrong.

[Mark Potts]

Donn: Interesting comment, but misguided. I'm not "stealing" anything. The Journal has chosen to make many parts of its site available for free, in spite of its pay wall, and that's what I'm accessing.

Dbenk: I got the $99 offer in a subscription-renewal e-mail; I believe it's also advertised on WSJ.com.

[me.yahoo.com/a/yOCEI04dk_u8D11YKy5.cU1l646CwtvhhiqR]

Hey Mark:

Could not agree more that it might be worth a little additional effort to hang onto the subscribers you've got as opposed to chumming for new ones. As many times as I have tried to drop the NYTs due to the steep subscription fee (esp for Sunday-OUCH)they have always succeeded in reeling me back in with some crazy offer putting the cancellation plan on the back burner at least for for a while.

[Amcydotorg]

I think that lack of effort to retain paying subscribers is simply about apathy. Many newspapers have simply given up on trying to make old business models work, and are moving on.

People will continue to pay for a WSJ subscription. We all know the coverage is excellent, and many feel that "sneaking around" to get free access to content is dishonest. I think that as long as folks can enjoy a good discount (like here: http://www.wsjprimerate.us/subscribe-wall_street_journal-discount-subscription.htm ) for a subscription, they don't mind paying for the quality.