The problem with charging for news sites is less about how many of your regular readers are willing to pay for the content and is more about how people interact

The problem with charging for news sites is less about how many of your regular readers are willing to pay for the content and is more about how people interact with your site. The majority of news articles on the web are accessed through linking from other sites (Google, blogs, etc). If you put up pay wall, you instantly lose most of that traffic. WSJ works around this by giving access to people coming from outside links, but I'm not sure how well that model works: http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/ http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/