As a Wall Street Journal subscriber (well, our office) ($119), it irks me to no end when they demand that I purchase a second subscription to view a complete story on the internet ($109). The print/online combo is $140.

But it doesn’t end there….if I were to look at the same content via Blackberry or iPhone, I would have to purchase a third subscription!

As for complete WSJ articles available thru Google search…News Corp has made a conscious decision to allow the Google crawlers across its site, in order to capture the random eyeballs that land on their pages from a Google link. I wonder how far their ad views/clicks would drop if they blocked Google entirely from searching their newsfeeds? They seem to purposely forget that Google is sending them clicks via random searches from people who would never subscribe to online WSJ!

(On a side note, nothing irks me more than the paid wall at Crain’s Advertising Age / Automotive News which blocks every click without a subscription….only to reveal the story they are charging for is a Reuters one, available freely on thousands of sites globally)