fivethirtyeight is behind a paywall now?

General Questions
#1

I just wanted to make sure my computer isn’t glitching out or something, but when I go to read a specific article within the fivethirtyeightblog at the New York Times, I am now getting this message:

CURIOSITY SATISFIED HERE. We hope you’ve enjoyed your free articles this month. Stay connected to the finest reporting in the world and be the first to know. With a Digital Subscription to The Times, you’ll continue to experience a level of insight and intelligence you won’t find anywhere else.

Then it wants me to become a digital subscriber.

Is anyone else getting this message? (I guess you have to have been visiting it for a while for this to pop up, from the looks of the message)

I thought that when Nate Silver decided to start working for the Times, he did so with the assurance that his blog wouldn’t be subject to a paywall. I hope that’s still true!

ETA: Never mind. I just found out that clicking a link from Twitter allows me to view the articles still. Phew!

#2

I think you can download 10 articles a month free from NYT without a subscription. Unless you have a go-around of course. His blog counts now.

#3

Yeah, NY Times only lets you see 10 articles a month for free, but it is very easy to cirumvent.

#4

Does the NYT not care about it’s paywall? When I discovered 538 was blocked, I figured I would have to go through some crazy process to get to it. Pretty much the first Google result gave me a year old article showing how to bypass it in one step. I assumed they would’ve fixed that by now, but it still works.

#5

It’s no secret. When it went paywall, Nate Silver said that the paywall wouldn’t affect Twitter links, Google News links and some other related entry points. I won’t attempt to unravel the marketing process there but it’s a feature, not a bug.

#6

Of course they could make the paywall much more strict if they wanted, but it’s in the interest of the New York Times that it’s a porous wall. They want people linking to and reading their articles, columns and other content. At the same time, they get revenues from those who pay for access, many of whom might have had print subscriptions in earlier decades.

#7

I read several NYT articles every day – mostly the editorials and other pieces in the Op-Ed section – and have [del]never[/del] rarely been stopped by a paywall. There seem to be a certain few regular features that I can’t get to, but that’s all.

I have done nothing knowingly or deliberately to circumvent any paywall, so it must be porous indeed. As I have mentioned many times, I run my browser with JavaScript disabled most of the time. (This alone cuts way down on ads and other junk.) And I purge all cookies, cache, and what-not regularly. I go to the NYT web site by typing the URL myself, not by clicking on any referring link.

Whatever effect that may have, I have not been bothered (much) by NYT paywalls.

#8

All you have to do is a Google search for the exact same article that is blocked and you can read it in Google News.

#9

The NYT has their policy online, and the stated policy (at least as it was back in the spring when I last read it) suggests some limited workarounds.

You get the 10 free reads a month, and once you’ve read an article once, you can read it again. So once you go to the main page of Nate Silver’s or Paul Krugman’s blog, you have access to that page all month, even as they add new content. But if only part of a post is on the main page of the blog, the rest of the post counts against your 10.

They also tell you that you can still get to articles for free via links from other sites, even after you’ve used up your 10 free articles. So put a link to that article in a SDMB post, click on it, and I bet it gets you there.

#10

I find it odd that they consider a blog to be an article, though. What I’m saying is, when I heard they were blocking articles, I never dreamed it meant they were blocking blogs–since the latter exist to be freely shown on the Internet–the idea of a paid-only access blog seems foreign to me.