NYT paywall is a fence of lollipop sticks worth $40 million

by Steven Mostyn - Mar 30 2011, 12:59

Earlier this week we brought you news regarding the online paywall erected by NYTimes.com in order to squeeze a cash commitment from readers long-since accustomed to accessing daily content for free.

Although NYTimes.com’s monetary system doesn’t completely shut out those not willing to purchase a subscription (readers are able to view 20 full articles per month before prompted to pay), we thought you may like to know how to scramble over the paywall with your cash intact—should you wish.

More pointedly, various Mashable testers have already discovered that by simply deleting ‘?gwh=numbers’ from the NYTimes.com URL readers can completely sidestep the block.

Hmm, something of an embarrassment considering The New York Times supposedly paid through the nose for its content paywall.

Similarly, the 20-story viewing limit will apparently reset itself whenever the user clears out their browser cache or switches to a different Web browser when met by the subscription screen.

According to a Harvard law blog, the NYT firewall cost a staggering $40 million USD to construct. In the building trade, that would be called falling foul of cowboy builders. Oops. 

Update: Either we were looking in the wrong place or the URL tweak is no longer functioning. However, The Tech Herald can attest to the effectiveness of cleaning out the browser cache (not that we’d ever condone it, of course).

Around the Web