-------- Original Message --------
| Subject: | NYT PAYWALL |
|---|---|
| Date: | Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:39:47 -0400 (EDT) |
| From: | claguerra245@aol.com |
| To: | Rhomp2002@earthlink.net |
NYSlimes Pays 40M+ For a Cheesecloth Paywall
The NY Times recently went to a paywall structure that doesn't allow its online readers to see full articles without paying a subscription.
They paid upwards of 40 million bucks for this structure. It's been revealed that the "sophisticated" coding is nothing more than a 4 line masking code that can be removed by anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Javascripts. FORTY MILLION!!! I LOVE the company that did this to them.
Story via Sweetness and Light From Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab:
The New York Times 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…
The full text of [any Times] article is still visible in the page source… [T]he overlay is nothing more than a little CSS and Javascript.
Unfortunately for the Times, there are plenty of popular (or popular-among-nerds) tools that tactically remove little bits of CSS and Javascript. There's Greasemonkey, there's Stylish — not to mention the ease with which a browser extension in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari can be built to strip out code…
(the fisking below was performed by Mr. Gilbert at Sweetness and Light)
Hilariously, this article goes on to suggest that even though the New York Times spent $40 to $50 million dollars erecting this 'paywall,' they intended it to be easily defeated:
And yet this workaround is so blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever worked with code that it's difficult to imagine it didn't come up in the paywall planning process. The other major news paywalls — WSJ, FT, The Economist — don't actually send the entire forbidden article to your browser, then try cover it up with a couple lines of easily reversible code. They just hit you with a message saying, in effect, "Sorry, pay up here" whenever you stray past the free zone…[The Times] can afford to let nerds game your system. [The Times] probably want them to game your system, because they (a) are unlikely to pay, (b) generate ad revenue, and (c) are more likely to share your content than most…
Only the Solons at Harvard school for journalism could concoct such a laughable theory when the truth is so painfully obvious.
The Times screwed up. Big time.
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