About Skip the Paywall

What it does

Paste the link to an article and the reader requests that page from the publisher, identifying itself as a search-engine crawler would. It extracts the article with Mozilla's open-source Readability library, the same code behind Firefox's reader view, removes scripts, adverts and embedded frames, and shows you the headline, byline, text and inline images. If the publisher refuses the request, it looks for an archived copy in the Internet Archive.

Because it never runs the page's JavaScript, it never triggers the browser-side meters that most magazines and regional newspapers use. That is why it works on 192 publications we have tested, listed on the home page, and not on sites that enforce their paywalls on the server. Our guide to metered versus hard paywalls explains the difference.