One of the main forms of monetization of a media is advertising, however, for some time now the use of so-called “paywalls” has been spreading, what this does is prevent reading the news in question. in full, unless you become a subscriber to the online platform. We are sure that you have found on some occasion that, while browsing a certain online newspaper, we cannot continue reading the article, and they will ask us to pay if we want to read it. Do you want to know how to bypass paywall and be able to read news without subscription?
More and more online media have these paywalls, that is, news where we can only read the headline and a very short entry, so that we subscribe to the service and be able to read the entire news in full. In this way, companies make money by selling more subscriptions, however, due to the way these paywalls are implemented, in many cases they do not actually block the content, but rather hide it from the view of users. There are different ways to bypass these restrictions, and below, we are going to show you how to do it.
What are Paywall systems
Paywall systems, also known as “Paywall”, are designed to prevent visitors who do not subscribe to the newspaper from reading the full news. This is normally used by online newspapers for the most relevant news, opinion news, etc. The goal is to limit access to content, so that visitors subscribe and thus earn money. Once the user has subscribed to the content for a certain period of time, they will be able to read everything without limitations. The most common thing is that certain articles are not available to users who are not subscribers, but you can make parts of the entire website that no one has access to, and even the entire website, this depends on the revenue policy they have. .
Right now in Spain, there are a large number of online websites that have this type of technology, to prevent us from reading the entire news story without having to pay. It must be taken into account that the media feeds on advertising through banners, and also content sponsored by different brands. However, it is possible to circumvent these paywall restrictions, to access all content completely free and without restrictions of any kind.
A very important aspect that we must keep in mind is that extensions such as Anti-paywall need constant updating as sites make changes to the systems they use. Some options work for a while, but later stop working. For this reason, it is possible that the same extension does work on some websites, but not on others. The important thing is to try different extensions on your favorite websites to “unlock” the content completely free of charge. The truth is that, for some time now, the Paywall system has been improved to prevent some tools from skipping or circumventing it.
Learn how to remove the paywall with Anti-Paywall extensions
The Anti-paywall extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers will allow us to unblock these online sites and read the entire news in full. Although it should be noted that it does not work on all sites, because website administrators continually update their Paywall technology to prevent anti-paywalls from unblocking content.
A very important aspect is that the extension works completely automatically, we don’t have to do absolutely anything. If we see the source code, we will see that it uses several ways to evade these blocks, posing as a Google Bot, cookies or “referer” to circumvent these paywalls, and not have to pay absolutely any money to visit these sites.
This type of software for the main web browsers has compatibility for many digital newspapers and websites, such as Chicago Business, Independent, The Times or Washington Post among many others. Personally, we have tested these extensions in Google Chrome and it has worked without problems. The installation method is very simple, we simply enter the extension through the Chrome extension store, we add the extension and we can see how these newspapers will no longer limit our access to the news, we can simply read it automatically and No problem. Users who use the Mozilla Firefox web browser should know that the process is exactly the same, they simply have to go to the Firefox application store, install the corresponding extension and make sure that it is activated. Once they have it active, when browsing the pop-up window to subscribe will not appear when reading an article or closed page.
In our experience, we have been able to access all the articles without problems, and we have not received any message asking us to subscribe to the newspaper in question. Depending on the website we go to, by default they allow us to read part of a news story or they directly block our access to all the content. With anti-paywall tools we avoid this problem.
Extensions to bypass the paywall in Google Chrome
We have tested several anti-paywall extensions in Chrome, as we mentioned before, some of them only work on certain websites, and others work on other platforms, the important thing is to find the extension that “unblocks” the content on your favorite website .
These two extensions work correctly, we recommend giving them a try.
Extensions to remove paywall in Firefox
If you use the Mozilla Firefox web browser, there are several very interesting extensions that work perfectly, below you have all of them to download directly:
Thanks to these extensions, for both Firefox and Chrome, you can bypass blocks when reading your favorite news, which should only be accessible to paying subscribers. In this way, you will be able to access all the content for free and without any limitations.
Bypass regional blocks using a VPN
On many news websites, especially those with audiovisual content, they may not be available in other countries outside of Spain. This means that, if we go on a trip abroad, we will not be able to access said news, whether written or video content. This is called regional blocking, and it is very common to find it on the main television stations in Spain where it is prohibited to broadcast in other countries due to copyright issues.
A very important aspect that you should know is that free VPNs such as WARP from Cloudflare or the Google VPN will not allow us to bypass these regional blocks that we mentioned. Although both services work really well and are the ones that we recommend you use to protect your connection, the truth is that they do not serve to bypass geographic blocks. The reason is that the VPN will always connect us to a server within the same country, and not in other countries or our country of origin. If we connect in France, it will automatically connect to a server in France, so we cannot bypass the regional block.
If you want to bypass regional blocks so you can continue viewing your favorite websites, then you have to turn to paid VPN services. These services will allow us to connect to dozens of servers spread around the world. We will simply have to use the official applications of these companies, choose the country we want to connect to, and click on “Connect” to proceed to access the Internet from the country we want to connect to. let’s choose. In this simple way, we can block regional blocks. Some services that we recommend are the following, all of them have very similar characteristics and work really well:
Another positive aspect of using a VPN (virtual private network) is that all traffic is point-to-point encrypted, the public IP address with which we will go out to the Internet is that of the VPN server to which we have connected, so our web browsing It will be quite anonymous and private, perfect for protecting our privacy when browsing different websites. All of these services, although they are paid, have a very low price of approximately €3 per month for a 2-year subscription. This way you can have a very fast, reliable, secure and private VPN service, perfect for evading these regional blocks imposed on us.
Conclusions
Right now in Spain we have many online newspapers with monthly or annual subscription to access all their content. The objective of this policy is to monetize all the work behind the research, and logically the work of writing the different articles. Generally these costs can be covered with what is generated from display advertising based on the audience, but it may not be enough. If you use the information from that medium in question daily, we believe that you should purchase the subscription to financially support the medium, however, if you are only interested in reading a specific news item and do not want to pay, then you can use these anti-paywall extensions that we have taught.
All of these extensions are free, in fact, there are many more that work for both the Firefox and Chrome operating systems, the two most used web browsers in the world. It is possible that some extension does not work correctly for you, the reason is that the technologies within the paywall are changing, so it must be updated almost continuously. We recommend you investigate different GitHub projects about these extensions, since they usually upload solutions in beta phase to avoid them. In case you want to bypass regional restrictions, you will have to use commercial VPNs to avoid any problems in this regard.
