To the folks interested in reading this article: Welcome, we’re glad you’re here. Now pay up.
That is, unless there’s an easy way to get all of this glorious internet content for free, right? Sure, it’s questionably immoral, maybe even illegal, to sneak past the paywall and read this article without coughing up a penny (RIP, pennies).
But many, many people are doing just that.
Seriously. As Straight Arrow joins a growing list of media outlets to implement a paywall, and as the news industry as a whole struggles to keep the lights on, few people are willing to open their wallets and pay for the news they consume, new research shows.
Download the Straight Arrow app today to get the stories that matter free from manipulation, bias or agenda.™
Point phone camera here
Instead, many people turn to workarounds such as archival websites they know little about — and whose operators may leverage their web traffic in ways they never expected. Like cybercrime.
That’s according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Notre Dame and Georgia Tech, who analyzed a year of visitor data from the website of an unidentified major U.S. newspaper. The researchers looked at some 209 million page views and concluded that just 0.21% of people — that’s 21 out of every 10,000 — subscribe when they hit a paywall.
“Folks that are willing to circumvent paywalls are always going to find ways to circumvent paywalls,” said Vamsi Kanuri, a marketing professor at the University of Notre Dame and a co-author of the report. But ultimately, Kanuri told Straight Arrow, news outlets should see the piracy as a compliment.
“There’s a reason why people are trying very hard to get around your paywall,” he said. “They love your coverage.”
Despite efforts by people to bypass paywalls, the researchers write, they remain “an effective nudge,” since the likelihood of someone subscribing “without encountering it is far lower.”
How many people bypass news paywalls?
More than three-quarters of U.S. newspaper websites have paywalls, up from 60% a decade ago. Yet the number of Americans with news subscriptions has held steady over the last several years, according to a recent survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Just 16% of U.S. readers reported paying for any online news in the last year, according to the survey.
The Pew Research Center has come to a similar conclusion, with one recent survey finding that just 17% of people have subscribed, donated or became a paying member to a news outlet in the last year. Hitting paywalls is common, an experience encountered by three-quarters of people “at least sometimes.” Of the 83% of U.S. adults who said they didn’t pay for news in the last year, the top reason for withholding payment was simple: They could get the same information elsewhere, for free.
Consumers are being hit from every direction these days with new subscription pitches, from streaming services like Netflix to to the “Taco Lover’s Pass” at Taco Bell. All of those monthly fees are giving rise to disgruntled consumers and a growing concern of “subscription fatigue.”
Companies have become increasingly aggressive in preventing people from circumventing paywalls, including through shared passwords. Among them is The New York Times which, a reporter at Business Insider observed on X in June, had prevented her from using “my old coworker’s mom’s account that I’ve been using for the last decade.”
So if people aren’t willing to pay for the news — what do they do instead?
About 10% seek to circumvent the paywall, most often by switching to “private browsing mode” to fool browser cookies that track users across web sessions, according to the forthcoming research, which was accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal MIS Quarterly. Kanuri shared a copy of the research with Straight Arrow.
Such a technique is useful for websites with “metered paywalls,” which allow users a set number of free articles before requiring a subscription to continue reading. Much of the content on Straight Arrow’s site was recently placed behind a metered paywall.
Most people abandon the news article altogether. The largest share of visitors, 59.2%, left the news site immediately after hitting a paywall, the researchers found, while only about 2/10 of 1% agreed to subscribe on the spot. About one in five people turned to free articles elsewhere on the site.
And although the subscription rate was, for publishers, depressingly low, the researchers found that people were a whopping 84 times more likely to subscribe when they encountered a paywall compared to those who did not.
Given that finding, Kanuri concluded, paywalls “are immensely effective.”
“It reminds people that journalism is not cheap and, in order to access valuable journalism, you’ve got to pay,” Kanuri said. “Someone’s got to pay for the news reporter’s time or the editor’s time.”
Not all paywalls are built the same, Kanuri said, and some are much easier to bypass than the others.
But at the end of the day, he said, news publishers must acknowledge that many people will find a way around them. Ultimately, he said, news outlets are “better off having some leaky version” of a paywall, in order to make money from the few who ultimately subscribe — and from the masses who encounter advertisements even after visiting the site in incognito.
But the easiest way for news outlets to earn revenue, Kanuri said, is to provide readers with information they can’t get anywhere else.
“Original content is something that subscribers are more willing to pay for” than aggregated articles that resemble those from other outlets, he said. “So I think newspapers should — and journalists should — still focus on local news to drive demand.”
The rise of the paywall bypass
Some scheming readers — though the prevalence remains unclear — turn to archival tools like the Wayback Machine to bypass paywalls. Such tools allow people to access articles through snapshots of webpages beyond login screens.
Archival sites have come and gone, such as the popular paywall bypass tool 12ft.io. Last year, the News/Media Alliance, a news industry trade group, celebrated the takedown of what it called the “notorious paywall bypass website,” following pressure on its web host. The group promised to take action against other paywall bypassing technologies “in order to protect its members’ copyrighted continent.”
Danielle Coffey, the trade group’s president and CEO, called the takedown a victory for news publishers and “a win for anyone who cares about quality content.”
“Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue,” Coffey said in a press release. “Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem.”
These days, there’s a new site on the block: archive.today, which also operates similar domains including Archive.ph and Archive.is. People are visiting the sites even though they, and nobody else, knows who is behind them.
Archive.ph is distinct from the Internet Archive, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose archival tool the Wayback Machine has also become a boogeyman for news publishers concerned the service could be used by Big Tech companies to gobble up their proprietary news articles to train artificial intelligence models. The Wayback Machine has secured support from journalists, many of whom rely on the historical record of the internet for investigative reporting.
While the Internet Archive “is a legitimate 501(c)(3) nonprofit,” archive.today “is an opaque mystery,” said Jani Patokallio, an engineer who blogs under the pen name Gyrovague. Patokallio published an investigation into archive.today in 2023 but was ultimately unable to say with certainty who is behind the site.
“My interest has always been more about how the site is operated & funded in general,” Patokallio wrote in an email to Straight Arrow. Ultimately, he said, the site “appears to be a one-man show,” operated by someone from Russia. But ultimately, he said, the operator’s identity “is pretty irrelevant” and they’ve “hidden their tracks pretty well.”
That hasn’t stopped the FBI from trying to unmask the site’s operator who, apparently, recently came across Patokallio’s 2023 blog post and set out to retaliate.
In a subpoena last year to the domain registrar Tucows, the FBI sought the personal information about the “customer behind archive.today,” including the person’s name and billing address, as part of an unspecified “federal criminal investigation.”
Then, in January, Patokallio accused the archive.today site operator of leveraging people’s traffic to carry out a distributed denial of service cyberattack on his blog. The archive.today site operator allegedly injected malicious code into the archival service’s CAPTCHA page, which is used to verify a user isn’t a bot, sending a swarm of traffic to Patokallio’s blog in an attempt to render it inoperable.
Wikipedia blacklisted archive.today in February, with its editors concluding the encyclopedia site “should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack,” while pointing to additional evidence that the archival site’s operator “altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”
Patokallio told Straight Arrow the DDoS attack on his blog “ceased around June” and the archive.today operator has “moved on to beefing with Wikipedia.” That the service archives just about everything on the web and does not permit redactions “is very inconvenient for many media and government organizations,” Patokallio said, and is “likely the real reason” the FBI is “sniffing around,” to find out how the site operates — and, perhaps, shut it down.
“On the Internet, you’re either the customer or the product,” Patokallio said. “Running a site like archive.today is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, so they’re making money off you in some way.”
Round out your reading
- Former Fetterman staffers create social media account to expose former boss.
- Why Gen Z finally wants Boomer hand-me-downs.
- Want a copy of Pete Hegseth’s driver’s license? It’s for sale on the dark web.
- Smart glasses helped a man see the world. The privacy panic took it away.
- Americans are keeping cars longer, so the auto industry is making it easier to pay for repairs.
