View Wall Street Journal Online articles from Digg
The Wall Street Journal Online is adding Digg buttons across the entire site, and you'll now have full (free) access to the articles submitted to Digg. The Digg buttons have started appearing on WSJ.com articles tonight. — Digg on.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg has spent the past eighteen months pushing past its early-adopter base: the June 2006 push beyond 'geeks', the December 2006 feature wave, and the September 2007 social networking overhaul all aimed at broadening who submits and who reads. Today's move inverts the usual direction of that expansion — instead of Digg chasing mainstream readers, a flagship mainstream publisher, The Wall Street Journal Online, installs Digg buttons across WSJ.com and grants full free access to any article submitted to the service.
The timing lands mid-debate over the Journal's own paywall: same-day syndicated reports have News Corp's Rupert Murdoch pressing for free access to WSJ.com while an executive dismisses that talk as 'jumping the gun.' The Digg arrangement functions as a controlled experiment — opening the archive selectively through one aggregator's referral stream rather than wholesale.
First-order effects
- Digg users gain full free access to otherwise paid WSJ.com articles the moment they are submitted, making a Digg submission functionally an unlock key to the Journal's paywall.
- WSJ.com trades metered revenue on submitted stories for placement on Digg's homepage pipeline, betting that crowd-surfaced referrals outearn the subscriptions those stories would have sold.
Second-order effects
- Other subscription-gated publishers now face a live template for partial openness — competitors must decide whether to match social-referral unlock deals or hold the line as the Journal tests whether aggregated traffic converts to paying readers.
- The deal hands Murdoch's free-access camp internal evidence: if Digg-referred free articles drive measurable audience growth without collapsing subscription revenue, it strengthens the case against the executive's 'jumping the gun' caution.
Third-order effects
- If the selective-openness model holds, paywalls stop being binary gates and become price-discrimination systems — full access for subscribers, free access routed through whatever distributor delivers the most engaged traffic, which shifts bargaining power toward the aggregators who control discovery.
- A pattern of mainstream publishers adopting community-voting buttons would further legitimize crowd curation as a front-door for legacy news, accelerating the shift Digg has been building toward since its 2006 audience-broadening push.
The trend: News paywalls are beginning to unbundle access from subscription, with publishers granting free passage through high-traffic social distributors like Digg as a hedge before deciding whether to open entirely.