Categories: OLD Media Moves

WSJ paywall falls with Chrome extension

Eric Mack for CNET writes about how The Wall Street Journal‘s paywall can be avoided with the new Google Chrome extension.

Mack writes, “A free download in the Chrome Web Store, this rather simple bit of code provides easy access to much of the articles and other content that more upstanding Journal readers actually pay for.

“The app is basically a script that automatically searches for cached versions of WSJ stories on Google and then places a special icon next to a headline if one is available for that piece. Click on the icon and you’ll be redirected to it through Google, basically doing an end run around the paywall.

“The Wall Street Journal was one of the earlier adopters in the news business of the idea of a paywall–some online content is available for free, but if you want access to everything you’ll need to pay a subscription. It’s also one of the most successful, with plenty of people paying a few bucks a week for online access for several years now.

“‘Read WSJ’ is the latest vulnerability in the armor of the paywall as a concept in the newspaper business. Work-arounds for the New York Times’ paywall were being announced before it even went live, and the paper asked Twitter to shut down a feed that also attempted to circumvent the wall.”

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Jeremy Phillips says:
June 14, 2011 at 12:04 pm
My experience is that people who would use such tools would not have paid for the product anyway. For the higher-end readers of the Journal, it's more convenient to simply pay $2 a week instead of constantly chasing the newest way to avoid payment (that the WSJ will shut down eventually.) It's worth WSJ, NYT, and others' time to play whack-a-mole with high profile paywall-avoidance tactics but it'd be a huge and expensive mistake to try to anticipate all possible methods.
They only need to look to the debacle that is digital rights management in the software & gaming industries. These companies spend millions attempting to lock their products down, only to have them cracked before they’re even released.
Check out EA’s 5 year history unsuccessfully battling piracy: http://bit.ly/jeAI0N -- unsuccessful & expense prevention at the inconvenience of paying customers. Let’s hope NYT, WSJ, etc. don’t go down the same route. Mainly I would keep in mind that the percentage of the population who would install this extension is very small, and the overlap with people who would pay for this content is microscopic at best.
I would love to hear differing viewpoints.
Jeremy Phillips
http://www.linkedin.com/in/thejeremyphillips
vs says:
June 14, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Actually, I pay for full subscription but I am using the extension because it's simply easier then to establish a login, remember yet another password and start reading the articles. I don't read any editorial content online, since I like reading that in print (somehow the placement of editorials on paper frames their importance in my mind, or maybe it's just habit) and only the content that is hidden in inner pages in the print edition.