Respectfully, I'm not sure I follow the analogy. A restaurant's core business is serving food, and a restaurant charges for food. The Journal's core business is journalism, and it charges for journalism. Content isn't the "restroom" of the WSJ's business model.
As I've stated in a comment further down this tree, I don't like paywalls. I think they're an inefficient and suboptimal means of monetizing content. A paywall is basically a tax on readers who aren't savvy enough to bypass it. If you look at the economics of a paywall, it's basically monetizing the intersection of two sets of people: 1) the set of all people who really want to read the WSJ, and 2) the set of all people who can't get around a paywall when they encounter one. This intersection cohort -- call it "People who like WSJ and can't navigate paywalls" -- is probably a decent size, but it leaves a lot of would-be customers on the table. At the same time, the paywall hampers distribution and creates a bad user experience. It's an unsophisticated way to monetize content. That said, I don't find it "absurd." Bad, sure. Annoying, absolutely. "Absurd," no. Nor do I find absurdity in the premise that the WSJ should attempt to monetize its content.
As I've stated in a comment further down this tree, I don't like paywalls. I think they're an inefficient and suboptimal means of monetizing content. A paywall is basically a tax on readers who aren't savvy enough to bypass it. If you look at the economics of a paywall, it's basically monetizing the intersection of two sets of people: 1) the set of all people who really want to read the WSJ, and 2) the set of all people who can't get around a paywall when they encounter one. This intersection cohort -- call it "People who like WSJ and can't navigate paywalls" -- is probably a decent size, but it leaves a lot of would-be customers on the table. At the same time, the paywall hampers distribution and creates a bad user experience. It's an unsophisticated way to monetize content. That said, I don't find it "absurd." Bad, sure. Annoying, absolutely. "Absurd," no. Nor do I find absurdity in the premise that the WSJ should attempt to monetize its content.