This reminds me of the "Free Day Pass" salon.com used to have before it scrapped the idea entirely:

"So we put up an ad over the front door of the site. Subscribers wouldn't see it at all; other readers had to watch a 30-second video ad, then they got a 'day pass.'

"The day pass approach was beloved by the advertisers and hated by many, though not all, readers. More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/memories-paywall...