Where there's a wall, there's a way.....

The New York Times paywall learns about work-arounds the hard way - Nieman Labs:

The paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported.

And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript.

......

Canadian coder David Hayes has just released NYTClean, a bookmarklet that, in one click, tears down the Times’ paywall.

“Released” is probably even a little strong — it makes it sound like there was an extended development process. All NYTClean does is call four measly lines of Javascript that hide a couple

s and turn page scrolling back on. It barely even qualifies as a hack. But it allows you access to any New York Times story, even when you’re past the monthly limit. (I just tested it out with a Canadian proxy server — works just like it says.)

I met Arthur Sulzberger at the FT Digital Media conference a few weeks back*, and pointed out that I read he NYT online from the UK as its too bl**dy hard to find never mind buy the paper here, and so I read it online, but for me to pay for it I have to know that I can't get it free more easily. (We have done a lot of research into free vs paid-for online services recently, and a big thing coming back at us is that if Paying was less hassle (and prices more reasonable), more people would do it - but only if others don't get a free ride of course). As Nieman labs points out:

Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles. One represents all the people on the Internet who might be convinced to pay for nytimes.com. The other represents all the people on the Internet who (a) know how to install a bookmarklet or (b) have read a Cory Doctorow novel. Do you really see a big overlap between the two? If someone is absolutely certain to never pay for the NYT, then it makes sense to squeeze a little extra advertising revenue out of them on the rare occasions when a link sends them to nytimes.com.

The problem with that model, though, is that it assumes inefficiency. It assumes that the happy-to-pay crowd (or the grudgingly-will-pay crowd) never find out about the workarounds — or at least that the workarounds remain complicated enough that they won’t want to bother. One click, though, ain’t all that complicated.

Now that was predictable. Back to the drawing board, chaps......

* I realise now that if I had known what they were up to, I could have spent 5 minutes and saved him a fortune - virtual impact, eh