Hacking

The Secret Way to Easily Circumvent Most Internet Paywalls in a Pinch

Not that you should do this painfully easy hack often, but … why do things come up so high in Google searches if they’re just going to ask you to subscribe?

I have no idea how this photo relates to the topic, but somehow it does. Perhaps the guy is an anonymous hacker. Photo by Thomas Bjornstad on Unsplash

Here’s the situation: You’re Googling something, and the top article seems spot-on. So, you click it and it’s some news site or something that loads the page, but then a “subscribe” popover comes up preventing you from reading the piece. Invariably, it’s for little things, too, like you just wanted to read a quote or something.

And, look, I get it. Everyone’s got to make a buck. It’s tough out there for publishers, for sure. Hopefully they’re paying their writers well, too. So, part of me doesn’t want to actively encourage you to get around paywalls as a practice.

At the same time, if this happens to you 20x per day, you also can’t afford to subscribe to everything. And as I mentioned atop the piece, there’s something annoyingly wrong about sites with paywalls that rank atop Google searches (in my opinion). Maybe it’s just me, but if I Google “spaghetti sauce recipes” and the top site with an answer has a paywall, that just seems wrong to me.

Okay, Here’s How to Do It