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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.
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
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
Yes, disabling JavaScript stops the paywall, so does disabling cookies or referrer spoofing. The only reason the media cares about my hack is the narrative of "3 lines of code over my lunch break" is more interesting than "the paywall doesn't work with certain browser settings".
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
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
I thought about that too, until I found out that for the D.C. metro area, that's the intro price and only good for 8-12 weeks. After that, it doubles to $7.50/wk. Last time I checked -- granted, it was several years ago -- the newsstand price for the Sunday NYT was only $5.00. (In my case, since I own a smartphone but no tablet, I would be better off taking the Sunday NYT for 12 weeks, then switching to digital.) I'd be curious to know what the NY/NJ/"home area" rate is compared to D.C., or if other parts of the country have cheaper "standard" rates.