The other day I noticed referral links to my blog from an article in the Wall Street Journal. I wanted to read the article but I was unwilling to pay the $99 yearly subscription fee. Well I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Google has solved this problem for me. Apparently Google News has worked with multiple subscription-based news services to provide first click free service. According to Google News:
the very first article view by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn’t require subscription. While the first article can be seen without subscribing, all clicks on the article page are “trapped.” This means that if users click anywhere else on that page, they will be prompted to sign up.
So I scooted over to Google News and typed the name of the article into the search form. Milliseconds later I was able to read the entire article for free.