On Porous Paywalls | Hacker News Reader

On Porous Paywalls

avc.com

47 pointsbond9 comments

Isn't this just a version of segmentation? I'm not very clear on how the paywall works (specifically, how it doesn't work, i.e. how it can be bypassed), can someone elucidate?

There are a whole bunch of ways: you can visit X articles a month for free (I think it's 5), if you follow a link from a blog it's free (don't remember how they determine that), etc.

You get 20 free articles free per calendar month. Although like someone above said, you can delete cookies and reset e 20 article counter.

They seem to be using a simple cookie based scheme.

Everytime I've hit the paywall, all I had to do was delete my cookies and history. I could then reload the same URL (from the same ip address) and get back in for free.

The paywall is ludicrously easy to circumvent - clearing cookies, Chrome's incognito window, deleting the &gwh=stuff from the end of each page URL where you hit the wall.

But after a couple months of doing this, I paid for access. I'm not a rich man, I don't have money to throw at things I don't need, but I felt that the value I was getting from the NYT's reporting was worth paying for. I can't buy a copy here (although I do when I'm in the US) so this is my way of supporting great journalism.

I wonder how many people like me are out there - circumventing the paywall with ease, reading as many NYT articles each month as they want for free, but eventually deciding to pay to support the paper? Or am I an edge case? What I'm getting at is maybe the paywall's deliberately easy to get around, so you realise what value you're getting from the NYT.

If you come to the site through external links, like Facebook or Google News, you'll generally circumvent the paywall. Anything you find by browsing nytimes.com directly counts against the twenty free articles allowed for your account.

People who only read NYT stories when they encounter a third-party link will never see the paywall, while someone who actively uses the NYT as a regular news source eventually will.

I could probably clarify a few things. I built the paywall used at WSJ. WSJ's paywall is actually "porous" by design. The reasons for this have a lot to do with how news is discovered. Aggregators like Digg.com or Reddit.com can send a lot of traffic to an article but links don't get readily shared if they are locked behind a paywall. Search engines can also send a lot of traffic, but many, including google, won't index you unless there is something of value on the indexed page. This is one reason why you see a lot of sites having first click free, or first click from a search engine free, etc. Things that are considered in bypassing the paywall include request headers like referrer and cookie, query string parameters in the url, as well as ip addresses (what country you are in, etc). At one point if you were making a request from an airplane you would get access.

Very interesting, thank you.

Chrome incognito mode works fine to bypass, currently.

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