I could probably clarify a few things. I built the paywall used at WSJ. WSJ's paywall is actually "porous" by design. The reasons for this have a lot to do with how news is discovered. Aggregators like Digg.com or Reddit.com can send a lot of traffic to an article but links don't get readily shared if they are locked behind a paywall. Search engines can also send a lot of traffic, but many, including google, won't index you unless there is something of value on the indexed page. This is one reason why you see a lot of sites having first click free, or first click from a search engine free, etc. Things that are considered in bypassing the paywall include request headers like referrer and cookie, query string parameters in the url, as well as ip addresses (what country you are in, etc). At one point if you were making a request from an airplane you would get access.