Newspapers Hope Readers Will Throw Money over the Wall
GigaOM, March 8, 2011
By Mathew Ingram
As the financial screws continue to tighten on traditional media companies, more and more are choosing to throw their eggs into the basket labeled "paywall," despite a conspicuous lack of evidence that erecting barriers to non-paying readers -- or turnstiles that charge them after they've read a certain number of articles -- has any beneficial effects. In the long run, these walls are really just sandbags against a rising tide of free content.
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