Do you ever click on a link and get to a site that won’t open it because it’s behind a paywall? Or start to read a news story only to have it fade away and not let you complete it? It might be a link from a friend or from another story or a click that goes to a site that suddenly pops up a window asking you to subscribe. If we had to subscribe to every request, we’d be broke.
I once was directed to a link to a story in the Chicago Tribune from the Drudge Report. It asked me to subscribe to read the piece, but I’m not a Chicagoan and had no interest in subscribing. But it continued to spam me with ads for months on end, ignoring my requests to unsubscribe to the site that I had never signed up for.
The intrusion of paywalls and ads are proliferating all over the web. It’s understandable that news sites want us to subscribe, but they’ve become much less generous in allowing us to read a single story. And many of them now scrape our email address when we visit, even though we’ve not opted in.
Well, there is a solution to the occasional time when you want to finish reading that story. It’s using Web Archive, a site that will retrieve the story you are interested in reading, assuming it has been archived. You simply copy the link for the page you are trying to open and paste it into this window below, confirm you’re not a bot, and wait a few seconds for the story to open.
The link can be found at this page:https://archive.ph
Now I hesitated to publish this because I do believe we should pay for subscriptions to sites we visit regularly, and I pay for plenty. But I also believe we should be able to access an important story on an occasional basis without continually being blocked and then being spammed to subscribe.
I concur with the idwe we should sub to what we regularly read, but a different model I have seen on some publications is a limited number of free-to-read articles per month, usually 3 or 5. Seems reasonable to me, though this method also ends up with your email address in the hands of the subscription dept at whatever publication you land on that uses this paywall with a gap.