Crikey Paywall: How to Read Crikey Articles for Free

Crikey is the Australian independent news and commentary site founded in 2000 by Stephen Mayne and published by Private Media in Melbourne. It made its name on political gossip and media criticism and now runs investigations, long essays on national security and foreign policy, and a stable of combative columnists, with the free Crikey Worm newsletter summarising the day's news each morning. Its most-shared pieces, the investigations into candidates and the big-picture essays, are exactly the ones a reader arriving from social media is likely to find behind the subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Crikey paywall works

Crikey runs a metered paywall with a registration step in the middle. A casual reader gets a few stories free, creating a free account unlocks more, and a subscription removes the limit entirely. The list price is A$199 a year, and the site frequently advertises a discount for the first year. The gate itself runs on Zephr, a subscription platform used by a number of publishers.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and Crikey's own markup declares each article as not freely accessible (isAccessibleForFree: false) so that Google knows to treat it as paywalled. A script then checks whether you are logged in, a subscriber or over your limit and replaces the body with the prompt. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and Crikey sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 27 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,442-word Crikey essay arguing that the Western mindset and a blinding nostalgia for the US alliance are the real threats to Australia's national security loaded in full, all 32 paragraphs.
• A 1,232-word Crikey investigation uncovering a far-right X account linked to a One Nation candidate in Victoria loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.
• A 1,465-word Crikey column on the First Woke Wars of the 2010s and why only the little fish still get cancelled loaded in full, all 26 paragraphs.

Read a Crikey article in full

• Copy the article link. Crikey links look like crikey.com.au/2026/10/20/ followed by a slug of words from the headline, with the year, month and day of publication in the path.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

Other approaches

• The Worm. Crikey's daily Worm newsletter is free and gives a brisk summary of the morning's news with links back to the site.
• A free account. Registering without paying raises the number of stories you can open, which is enough for an occasional reader.
• Private windows. As far as we can tell the free-story allowance is tracked in your browser, so a private window generally starts the count again, though it will not get you past a piece that asks you to log in.
• Related free sources. Hansard, the Australian Electoral Commission's candidate records and ABC News are all free, and much of Crikey's political reporting can be followed up there.

How it compares with other Australian sites

Crikey's independent rivals behave the same way. The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, both from Schwartz Media, load in full in the reader, as do the Australian Community Media regionals covered in our Canberra Times guide. The big commercial mastheads do not: the News Corp Australia titles (The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail) and Nine's The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age block the reader, so there are no guides for them. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Crikey is a small independent newsroom that funds its investigations from subscriptions rather than from a large media group. If you read the Worm every morning and open its investigations every week, a subscription at A$199 a year, often discounted for the first year, is the right way to keep that reporting going.