The New Dark Age

22 March, 2010 – Editors Weblog

A new website discovered by The Guardian’s Digital Content Blog, BreakthePaywall!, has arisen to counter the paywalls that news organisations are investigating to increase their revenue from online news.

BreakthePaywall draws some similarities to the previous website BugMeNot which allowed non-registered users access to websites through a collection shared user names. Although BreakthePaywall comes from the same philosophy that inspired BugMeNot, the new site is a down-loadable application that modifies a user’s internet browser to essentially ‘trick’ paywall websites. Basically, the application works by making the web browsers of non-paying readers forget that they have already maxed out their limited access to the news.

Many news organisations such as The New York Times, ABC News Online, and The Nikkei in Japan are currently preparing to introduce paywalls to their websites. With the successful use of paywalls for news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, some media analysts view paywalls as the only method capable of saving news organizations in the Internet age.

BreakThePaywall remains relatively unknown and as such, is not a huge threat to news organizations that have already created paywalls. Still, the site serves as reminder of the Internet’s resistance to paid content.

Source: The Digital Content Blog