Does Clicking on Links to NYTimes Stories Count Against Paywall Limit?
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 | by Pat's Picks
It’s been a few weeks since the New York Times introduced its 20-article-per-month restriction. Yesterday, thanks to a tweet from @unluddite I got some clarity on how the Times paywall keeps score on how many stories you’ve viewed.
@Unluddite wrote:
@patkiernan Good news, your NYT links do not trigger the paywall. Just tested with 2 different links. Normally I get the paywall screen.less than a minute ago via Twitter for Android 
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Eugene Smolenskiy
unluddite
After some more discussion on the topic, the Times “Digital Subs” Twitter team jumped in with more detail.
@patkiernan Articles linked from blogs & social media remain free for all users even if they’ve already read their 20 free articles/mo. /CCless than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet Reply
Digital Subscribers
NYTdigitalsubs
But here’s the subtlety of the way this works:
If you are below the 20-article threshold for the month, any Times article you click on will put you one step closer to the limit. It doesn’t matter at this stage where you are coming from. You still lose one of your “free” articles whether you are coming directly to the URL, from within the Times’ website or from an outside blog or social media link.
Once you have hit the limit of 20 stories per month, the situation changes. Even though your attempts to navigate the NYTimes.com site directly will be rejected with a paywall screen, clicks on links to Times stories at PatsPapers.com, on Twitter or Facebook, or on other “outside” referrers will pass through without any trouble under the blog and social media exemption.
As has been well documented elsewhere, this approach leaves plenty of loopholes that you can use to circumvent the subscription requirement, but I’ll leave that to others to describe in detail. Rather than using those techniques or devising some personal scheme to reduce consumption of New York Times stories, I think it’s probably best just to go on clicking on the links that interest you and deal with the paywall when it becomes a problem for you. Or, you could employ the straightforward technique I have chosen to get around the paywall challenge: I have a subscription.
