I am willing to bet good money the problem NYT faces is the same problem that www.expertsexchange.com faces (opse forgot a dash), google won't index them if you

I am willing to bet good money the problem NYT faces is the same problem that www.expertsexchange.com faces (opse forgot a dash), google won't index them if you get a paywal when you are a user vs a bot. So probably the reason for the CSS hack. It was probably research and stuff. Basically you'd have a paywall but nobody will be able to get to it because the news won't come up on google news, google search etc. However why the price tag was not a maximum of $1,000,000 beats me. Possibly massive user and seo testing. Maybe a chunk was bribes?