Friday, March 18, 2011

The New York Times paywall is porous enough...

The New York Times paywall is porous enough that with only a little bit of effort you'll still be able to get whatever you want for free. It's still a pain, though. From the FAQ:
12. Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, search engines or my blog?

Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you've already read your 20 free articles.

When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in search results, you'll have a daily limit of 5 free articles. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.

This means that there are search engines that will work for unlimited click-throughs or you can just search Twitter for the content you want. Now if only someone could whip up a Firefox extension to do all that automatically...

Update: Now we finally see how @FreeNYT works: the owner merely created a Twitter List aggregating the various official NYT feeds into the FreeNYT Firehose. Unless they shut down those Twitter accounts, I don't see how they block it since it is using their own tweets.

No comments:

Post a Comment