It's silly to us hackers that the paywall can be defeated with Firebug/CSS/JS, etc... But does that mean that the NYT has failed in their mission to monetize t

It's silly to us hackers that the paywall can be defeated with Firebug/CSS/JS, etc... But does that mean that the NYT has failed in their mission to monetize their content? I'm not sure it does. I still have conversations with lots of folks people where I have to explain the difference between a browser, the internet, and that blue "e" on their desktop. The NYT probably has solid demographics on their target market, and I'm betting that folks like us that know enough to laugh at their paywall implementation are in the very low single digits percentage-wise. I'm just spitballing here, but I could see someone standing in front of the client saying, "Look, your demos say that 1.1% of your target market is going to be able to circumverent the paywall. The oooold reach around. That represents X dollars in lost revenue. The other 98.9% of your target demo is going to use the system as designed because they're not even going to understand what the nerds are talking about. However, our content is still going to get indexed by Google, which as we know drives X percent of our traffic. We're still going to serve ad impressions and content to that 98.1% of users, resulting in the X% conversion rate bizanalytics is projecting." My point is that the solution might be technically laughable but still meet the business objective.