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New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound
RedEaredSlider writes "As the New York Times' new paywall went live this afternoon at 2 p.m., discussion of the move has made the natural transition to methods of bypassing it. As expected, a number of loopholes and hacks have appeared. One of the more notorious methods appeared almost instantly. Using a Twitter account named @FreeNYT, an anonymous user aggregated every article the newspaper posted to Twitter. The site caught The Times' notice and before long, The Times requested that Twitter suspend the account, arguing that it violated its trademark. Another loophole uses four lines of CSS and JavaScript. Canadian developer David Hayes managed to strip the Times' website of any mention of digital subscriptions in addition to getting past the paywall. The hack was released in the form of NYTClean, a bookmarklet easily added to web browsers."
It's likely that the paywall is deliberately porous; as paywalls go, it's a relatively unrestrictive one. Readers referred from search or other sites are unlikely to notice a difference. Workarounds at least keep readers on their site.
I don't think they really care about workarounds. Most casual users wont bother with those but will buy a subscription if they feel like it's worth it. I wouldn't pay for NYT, but I sure could pay for a newspaper or a writer who I think is writing interestingly, informatively or studies the case. This is especially true on things like business and computer stuff, not so much everyday news.
...and they actually gain money from ad revenue, thanks to all the extra hubbub about their paywall. People ask themselves, "just what is so good about this news that people are willing to do anything to read it? Maybe I should check it out."
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
The genius of the Times approach is that it actually might work because of the weaknesses. Instead of a pay wall that everyone would be striving to scale, they have a "pay hedge" where passers-by can see over, and view whatever they like. Only if they wish to stay a while and drink the tasty NYT lemonade (or kool-aid if you prefer) need they fork over some money to enter through the purely ornamental gate.
The other component the Times has to get right is pricing, and charge an amount of money that people think is fair for entering. But at least the Times is getting the part right about how to ask for money while still maintaining a presence on the web instead of going dark to casual readers. All else is just negotiating the right price with readers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just drank a beer
I doubt it.
NYT probably has to keep the full page intact as opposed to keeping it from loading entirely, because otherwise Google's crawler would only be able to index 25 articles per month. Then they would start treating the Googlebot differently, and as that is against the TOS, Google would block their site.
So instead they serve the same pages, knowing Googlebot doesn't care about JS (hey, does disabling JS break the paywall?). So they adhere to the letter of Google's TOS and go against the spirit, which I'm sure they're fine with.
If the NY Times want to make themselves pay only I'm not going to go to the effort of bypassing anything or breaking any laws to read their content. I just don't care that much. Let them fade into insignificance as people get their news elsewhere.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
for $3.75/week you can get a sunday NY paper delivered in the US, and that gives you a free on-line subscription. By itself the on-line subscription is 3.50/week. SO for less than the postage you get the delightful dead tree version too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Uh, the value they are charging for is the reporting they do with a staff of about 2000 journalists. A lot of people value that and quite rightly so.
Can we say a firm afraid to lose it's printing press? It is natural and even desirable for businesses to go away when they are unwilling to acknowledge that the time of the buggy whip is past and new forms need to be explored. I kind of applaud them for have a $4 and $5 a week option, but when compared with the $7.5 a week option with home sunday delivery, it seems kind of pricey. With the millions of ads on their web pages, and not having to set the pages, and not having to print the pages, I can't believe that a $2.50 plan is not possible. Sure the expenses of the physical paper still exist, but those should be paid by the readers of the physical paper. They are the one's paying $800 a year for delivery of the dead tree edition.
I like the financials time model better. It is simple and understandable. It is basically the same price, but the levels are clearer and it does not differentiate mobile viewing so much
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If by "hard-hitting" you mean they repost everything the White House says as fact and refuse to call waterboarding "torture" when it's done by the US, then yes. The NYT is very "hard-hitting" indeed.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
My phone's SMS client is just ignoring that.
Either that, or the fact that they've won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news organization.
And how many of those were for stories that were blatantly false? I know of two off of the top of my head. A Pulitzer prize only means that you told a good story that promoted the agenda shared by most reporters and passed it off as news.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Unless you are in the greater New York area you don't need the NYT. They consider themselves the "journal of record", but in the real world they are just another mainstream media news outlet, and there is nothing special about their coverage.
I can find everything I need to know without them. For international news I can go to English language sites of the regions that are closest to the story. The same goes for events in the US. Why read the NYT about the situation in Japan when you can go to Japanese sources and the Wikipedia?
I have found that both British news and Al Jazeera are as good, or even better then any US based new organization when it comes to international reporting. All US based news is dumbed down for the domestic market. And US mainstream media are incapable of honest reporting about right wing loonies because they are afraid of loosing viewers. This is one reason the birtherism and the fake controversy about Obama's citizenship is still makes big headlines.
So if the NYT doesn't want me to look at their stuff it's no big loss. I look forward to reading about their bankruptcy in other news forums.
Why is Snark Required?
There will be an article in the NYT about how easy it is to bypass the NYT paywall
that would be entertaining
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Googling the story title will usually reveal the whole story minus the subscription notice.
Other sites that require simple registration can usually be circumvented with sites like bugmenot.
All in all, their attempts to embargo information will not easily be met unless those who produce the browsers and possibly the operating systems cooperate. In closed environments, iOs is a great example, they will have much better luck but even then as long as the support browsers in those environments ways abound.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The New York Times has been dead to me ever since Bill Keller, Executive Editor, admitted that he won't publish anything relating to the US govt. without their prior approval.
Incredibly sad behaviour for what used to be one of the leaders of the "Free Press". And thanks again, Wikileaks, for exposing another facet of the insidious corporate takeover of US democracy.
Using a Twitter account named @FreeNYT, an anonymous user aggregated every article the newspaper posted to Twitter. The site caught The Times' notice and before long, The Times requested that Twitter suspend the account, arguing that it violated its trademark.
That is incorrect. @FreeNYT wrote, "The @NYTimes took exception with @FreeNYTimes using their logo. @FreeNYT never did and was never shut down. #clarification."
Source: http://twitter.com/FreeNYT/status/51326909027594240
All this person did was create a Twitter list consisting of 40 New York Times accounts.
Incidentally, no one seems to have mentioned that the easiest way to bypass the paywall is to use the RefControl add-on for Firefox. Configure it to fake the referrer information to tell the nytimes.com that you are always coming from Twitter, and you can then navigate through their site at will.
It looks like the 'NY Times' has learnt from the failure of 'The Times' in its paywall. Once Murdoch setup his paywall for those papers, they basically ceased to exist as far as online was concerned and their paper based readership fell the most out of all UK papers (11.7%). In essence the only way is down if you consciously pull up the drawbridge, since the quality is not high enough to get new readers to pay. By making the paywall essentially voluntary, they get money from the dumb, but don't lose the smart. It won't save them, but its not going to be so fast a decline as it could be.
That's Prototype. And the NYT uses that on their sites. You don't need it "in your browser". They already provide it just by viewing the site with JS enabled.
Life. Is. Good.