Beat the New York Times Paywall with the Stop Button

By Paul Olson | Published: March 29, 2011

I don’t read the New York Times much.  I like their Chrome web app, but I just don’t always dig their content.  It’s just a little oddly pretentious.  (If I want pretension, I’ll read The Economist.)  So the NYT 20-free-articles-a-month limit isn’t a big deal to me (I probably only read 3 articles in a given month) … and I’m certainly not about to donate money to their cause (they’re not NPR), but today I wanted to see how it worked, so I fired up a Chrome incognito browser window and opened 21 tabs of stories and hit the wall.  (My first theory was that the ‘incognito’ mode would defeat the paywall — I was wrong.)

Now, rumor is that the paywall took $40 million to build.  That’s insane.  Especially when you consider my genius way to beat it: the stop button … also called le bouton d’arrêt.  Here’s what you do:

  1. After hitting the paywall, refresh the page.
  2. Let the main content load.
  3. Push the browser ‘stop’ button.
  4. Enjoy an ad-free and paywall-free reading experience.

Good try, NYT.  Goodbye, $40MM.

The Great Wall of China in B&W
Creative Commons License photo credit: mattyeo | Similar ROI; similar effectiveness

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  • http://twitter.com/TCarroll2 Trevor Carroll

    Nice work around. I just tried it, and it worked perfectly.

  • One of the few honest people

    So, you don’t read the NYTimes much because “you don’t like its content”–’oddly pretentious, you say? (I suppose one person’s “odd pretention” can be considered educated, well-researched, professional journalism to someone who thinks deeper than a printed Rush Limbaugh resume). So, you happily figure out a way to, in essence, steal from the NYT. I’m sure you’d pay handsomely, though, if FoxNews.com began to charge, right?

    And, since it’s OK to steal something online, I’m sure you don’t mind going to work and not getting paid, or maybe encouraging people to steal products or services from the company you work for.

    Jerk…

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    This is the greatest comment ever posted on my blog. Thank you, OOTFHP.

  • http://twitter.com/bwMcNally Brendan McNally

    Yeah I figured this out within a minute of reaching the limit…it’s so obvious, the paywall loads after the actual page. This can’t last forever though…