Why is theonion.com suddenly charging people for its content?
August 6, 2011 10:52 AM   Subscribe

Why is theonion.com suddenly charging people for its content?

Was on the theonion.com today and when I tried to read the main story I got this message:

"You have arrived at your 30-day allowance of 5 free premium pages from America's Finest News Source. If you enjoy our probing and analytical journalism and want full access, we ask that you support our hardworking reporters by purchasing a subscription for as low as / month or / year."

When did The Onion start charging for its content? I've tried to find other people's reactions to this but I can't find a single reference to The Onion's decision to start charging its readers, which seems odd. Has anyone else got this message?
posted by Spamfactor to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: They're testing a paywall
posted by sanko at 10:55 AM on August 6, 2011


Best answer: I just read about this yesterday, here.

Currently, it's only for non-US readers, so that's probably why you hadn't heard much about it. Because we're the loudest.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:56 AM on August 6, 2011


Response by poster: Ah I see, that's a bit of a shame. At least they're not charging much. And so far I've been getting around it by quickly saving the page as a pdf file before the warning pops up. Hopefully they'll decide against a paid service
posted by Spamfactor at 11:02 AM on August 6, 2011


The Onion uses the same paywall service as Postmedia newspaper Times-Colonist. It's pretty pathetic, as the content can easily be accessed using incognito mode on Chrome.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:04 PM on August 6, 2011


Another paywall-busting technique that works on several sites is to delete everything after the "?" in the url and hit enter. I don't know if that works for The Onion, but it works for the NYT.
posted by lesli212 at 4:06 PM on August 6, 2011 [3 favorites]


If the blocker pops up after the page loads, it might be defeated by disabling javascript.
posted by galadriel at 8:07 PM on August 6, 2011


Response by poster: Great suggestion from jcreigh and KokuRyu, using incognito mode in Chrome seems to be doing the trick.
posted by Spamfactor at 6:32 AM on August 7, 2011


I haven't noticed the paywall, and I'm overseas.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 7:35 PM on August 8, 2011


With the NYT all you have to do is hit 'reload', wait for it to reload, and then hit 'stop' before the pay-fence thing comes up. Or use incognito mode.
posted by delmoi at 7:44 PM on August 8, 2011


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