Starting Monday, the New York Times will limit visitors to NYTimes.com to only 20 articles per month. They’re trying to drive more paid subscriptions. However, they also don’t want to kill off the traffic that tends to be lucrative for attracting advertisers, like search engine visitors and social media users. The Wall Street Journal has been limiting access to their online articles for a while now as well.
Many people know this already, but a quick tip is to copy and paste the article title into Google, and then click on the link from the Google search results. Alternatively, try Google News specifically. (Google may get capped after a while too, so try Bing.) You’ll be able to read the full article. Try it out with the last WSJ article I linked to, which is normally blocked:
Schwab To Spend $1B On OptionsXpress
Additionally, Gizmodo shares more tricks to view the Times, and another fellow made a simple bookmarklet.
It’s a hard balance between paid and advertiser-supported content, and I do value some of their content, but honestly I won’t pay for it if I can’t share it online with other readers to read for themselves. I suppose we’ll see if this nag-ware experiment works.
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I love the NYT but $195/year is a bit much so I’ll be using your tips in the future once the wall goes up. Thanks for sharing!
I appreciate the ideas to save by not paying the NY times, but this is the exact reason every other newspaper in the country sucks. It costs money to produce high quality news content and someone has to pay for it. Who do you expect to pay for it?
It almost seems like that don’t want me to come to their site. Is the NYT really so good that I would go through all the trouble to read a story – not for me…
Max, the fact of the matter is that there are places to get high quality news content that’s free
Are the RSS feeds for NY Times free? I read a good bit of the WSJ and Washington Post each day for free on my Kindle that way.
While I agree with Max that someone has to pay for good news, I find it very hard to pay for a subscription when you can read so much online for free. If they’re giving away free RSS feeds, they’re basically giving away that content, so why should I pay for it? I really don’t have a solution. I grew up with newspapers, and feel bad, but that’s the plain truth.
That said, I do buy an occastional $0.75 paper when I’m say eating alone at McDonald’s. But I don’t think I’ll subscribe to a paper newspaper again. I get four free smaller local newspapers each week thrown into my driveway, and just about all of them go straight into the recycling bin.
Forgot to throw in the NY Times FAQ link:
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscriptions-and-purchases.html#digital-sub-no-sub
I just don’t like that if I read an article I like, I can’t link to it in my blog and have it read and discussed. Right now, I have to tell people a roundabout way to read it. (Thus this post.) But if they completely close it off, I won’t link to it all and will simply find other info sources.
It’s their content, they can do whatever they want, but it may be in their best interest to keep it free online. Or maybe this half-solution is better, I don’t know.
I got my fees waved for 2011 thanks to Lincoln.
http://www.psfk.com/2011/03/lincoln-offers-frequent-ny-times-readers-a-way-around-the-paywall.html
So did Lincoln just contact you directly via reading behavior tracked by NYTimes.com? I read decent amount of articles, I guess not enough. Or did you get the targeted banner ad?
It has taken a post like this to move me to comment after reading for a long time – a testament to my surprise at your flagrant support of methods that take money out of one person’s pocket to the detriment of all. As an original content provider I would think that you have a certain level of respect for original works – the difficulty in producing them and creating a living off of them – and that you would align yourself with the NY Times. In fact, because this blog is a creative ideas enterprise with a little new aggregation I would think you recognize the extreme effort that sending, say, reporters to Libya during a civil war, or having a dining section, sports sections, magazine, and book review entail.
A frugal ethos is not a carte blanche excuse for manipulating every possible loophole in the world. If you use a service you should pay to provide for that service’s continued existence. If, rather, you don’t value the price the NY Times places on their content and the reasonable middle ground they have staked out then stop using the service. To say that you will continue to eat even after the buffet is closed is unethical. That you will share your methods is worse.
Rationalizing your position by saying you won’t pay for it if you can’t share it is placing yourself on shaky ground. You can’t freely share the physical newspaper, physical magazines, the online Financial Times, music from iTunes, access to your Netflix account, your cable subscription, or software yet you likely pay for all those media services. If the NY Times is trying to induce payment for people who use a significant amount of their service we should all have the presence of mind and self-respect to realize we are heavy users when we cross the line and fork over money. Frugality is one thing, stealing another.
@Aaron – I don’t agree. Stealing? Seriously? The NY Times made a decision regarding their content, telling me via e-mail:
“Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.”
I’m following their published rules, and I don’t think you or anyone else can decide for others how I should follow them past that. Am I allowed to follow NY Times on Twitter and visit that way? Yes. What if I find about the article from another source first and then go to my Twitter page? Now I’m stealing? Give me a break.
If someone wants to pay $200-$500 a year for the Times, then that’s up to them.
If I read the NYT site as a primary news source I would pay, but I cannot justify $195/year for a basic membership when I probably read just over the 20 articles a month limit.
I assume the NYT will track us through their cookie. Just erase the cookie, and you would be considered a “new” visitor.
I received an email from the NY Times with the Lincoln offer
Re: Lincoln offer
I’ve been a NY Times “today’s headlines” email subscriber for many years.
This is really an attempt by news media sources that previously generated their income from the sales of newspapers and magazines to generate a new revenue stream. The market is changing and people are no longer buying newspapers and magazines at the same rate. The loss of this income is forcing these hurting industries to come up with a new model to grow and generate new income. Unfortunately I do not believe this model will work.
I definitely agree with you ern! yeah you were that right. Why are we gonna pay such amount when we are just reading random entries/stories?