Over the years I've become an avid reader of the New York Times. I don't always agree with their commentary, but their reporting and analysis are excellent and I've come to read it several times a day.
I always wondered why they made all their news available for free. After all, other major newspapers such as The Economist and the Financial Times have had paywalls for years. We had a subscription to the New York Times in the past but a newspaper made out of paper is very inefficient -- reading it on the phone is so much more practical.
I ran into the "soft limit" of the Times within 4 days of the new month, both on my browser and my BlackBerry. It's a valuable news source to us, so as of this morning we're subscribed.
It's strange to see how easy it is to circumvent the paywall (using NoScript in your browser in sufficient); I suppose they assume most casual readers won't go to that length. Still, sending the whole article but overlapping it with a CSS popup is trivially easy to get around.