A handful of overseas users of its wildly popular mobile SNS service WeChat reported they were blocked from sending some messages.
According to Guardian News & Media, the traffic to the site was largely driven by overseas users while the recent Snowden revelations proved popular online.
"We're not on some mission for global domination, but clearly we do have an attraction to overseas users, and it would be foolish not to monetize that," he said.
This has a number of (admittedly small) risks, but also a range of benefits: the file has a stronger chance of being cached on the user's end as other sites reference Google's copy, and since Google use a worldwide CDN, our overseas users can actually download the file from a closer server than guardian.co.uk can offer them.
"No one else has sought to charge for digital access to a mass audience newspaper, and, though it's early days, we are encouraged by the strong start achieved by the Sun," said David Dinsmore, editor of The Sun. Dinsmore said the Sun was not looking to target overseas users like the Daily Mail and admitted the publisher's social media strategy has not been coherent enough to date.
Access is priced at $108 for overseas users, or 2,750 INR ($42) for those in India.
"Domestic users, many of whom already baulk at the level of censorship imposed on them, would react unfavourably if Tencent were to offer unfiltered content to overseas users".
The sample size will expand, the at-work component is growing 20% each quarter and overseas users will soon be added.
"These programmes are already freely available in the UK, so we're running this trial only for overseas users," the corporation said in a statement.
About 80%% of users left location information, which for Chinese nationals is identified at the provincial level, including the municipalities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing (treated as provinces), while overseas users are labelled by their country of origin.
