New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound 127
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.
Pay Hedge (Score:5, Insightful)
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.