NYtimes.com going behind paywall

[notyoueither]

BTW, I hearby claim ownership of my idea. TM, c, etc.

[Egbert]

I'm unlikely to sign up to any of them due to the hassle, and the ability to get quality elsewhere.

I would sign up for a single service that gave me access to all of them for a reasonable price.

They could turn the hordes of people like me, who have never paid a cent for any of their products into paying subscribers, if they make it simple enough. That would be their furture and how they could make this work well, and not just be rent collection on the way to the grave yard.

There is plenty of free news from the BBC.

BBC

[-Jrabbit]

US paywall starts March 28. I got the notice in my morning email.

Of note:
Tablets/mobiles will have free access only to the "top news" section sans subscription.
Articles linked via social media (FB/Tw) will get full access to that specific article (only).
Print subscribers get free total access.

This will severely limit my click-throughs to NYT. But a little creative social networking looks like it will circumvent their evil plan to stay in business.

[Cort Haus]

There is plenty of free news from the BBC.

BBC

British taxpayers gift to the world.

[notyoueither]

We give you back Celine Dion, Dob Cherry, and the CBC.

[Cort Haus]

Can you throw in Terrance and Philip?

[notyoueither]

We already did, or at least the idea for the caricature. It's a pretty good caricature, too.

[DanS]

The WSJ and FT are free. But you have to come to pay articles via Google News. I assume that the same will be the case with the NYT.

[notyoueither]

What?

I've Googled pay articles by headline and writer, and not had to pay.

edit: ah, I misread.

[Thorn]

Just put more advertising revenue as priority no good reason to pay for biased inaccurate opinions....

[Wezil]

Only a few days after the New York Times launched a paywall on its website for Canadian visitors, a Canadian programmer has come up with a free workaround to keep the site open to all, and it only took four lines of code.

David Hayes, a Kitchener, Ont., developer, cracked the paywall during his lunch break.

“It’s just a four-line script, plus a few more to allow me to update it,” he

said in an e-mail to QMI Agency on Tuesday. “I wrote it over lunch. I’m a little surprised it took off, over 5,000 people are using it so far and it’s

less than a day old.”

The code loads into a user’s browser as a button that looks like any other bookmark. When confronted with the paywall, users can click the button to reveal the full text of the article behind it.


“I think the NYT is in a tough position in that their status as a paper of

record needs people to be able to see the content, but their income stream is dependent on restricting access to that content,” Hayes said. “It’s very hard to show-but-hide.”

To block articles that users aren’t supposed to read, the Times simply

places a grey screen over the text and bounces a “please pay us” window in front of the user.

Hayes’s script prevents that screen and payment window from loading into the browser, while letting everything else load as normal.

As a developer at the Nieman Journalism Lab points out: “The other major news paywalls — WSJ, FT, The Economist — don’t actually send the entire forbidden article to your browser, then try cover it up with a couple lines of easily reversible code. They just hit you with a message saying, in effect, “Sorry, pay up here” whenever you stray past the free zone.”

Hayes’s program is called NYTClean and is currently only available on his website at euri.ca, which is currently slowing down significantly due to

heavy interest from would-be Times readers.

NYTClean isn’t the only way to get around the paywall, though. The newspaper’s site also allows free visits from anyone clicking on links distributed through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The Times launched the Canadian paywall on March 17. It is expected to launch in the U.S. by the end of the month.

"Our digital subscriptions have been designed to allow a generous amount of content to be free through various methods, including the Web site, apps and links from third-party sites like social media, blogs and search," New York Times Company spokeswoman Kristin Mason wrote in an e-mail to QMI Agency.

"As with any paid product, we expect that there will be some percentage of people who find ways around our digital subscriptions. We will be monitoring the situation."

Hayes says he loves the Times — “It was literally the first page I bookmarked when I got on the Internet," he said — but he couldn't resist the paywall's challenge.

"It’s just an iron rule of nerd-dom, if you put an interesting looking wall in front of us, we’ll try to get around it.”

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2011/03/22/17714806.html

[-Jrabbit]

Sweet.

[MikeH]

What an unbelievably weak technical solution to implementing a paywall.

Amazing that someone with their web resources could come up with something so weak.

[-Jrabbit]

Perhaps they had a clue. Perhaps that's why they tested the wall in Canada - so Asher could crash it before they tried in the US.

[Wezil]

It's not surprising the guy who did it lives in Kitchener. Hi-tech area (U of Waterloo and RIM among others).