Wired and The Verge Paywalls: How to Read the Full Article

Tech journalism spent a decade being free and ad-supported, and then, one by one, the big sites added subscriptions. Wired was among the first. The Verge followed in late 2024 with a subscription that gates a slice of its reporting. If you have hit a "subscribe to keep reading" box on either site, here is what is going on and how to get the full article.

How the Wired paywall works

Wired is a Condé Nast title, so it uses the same metering as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Vogue. Non-subscribers get a few free articles per month, counted in a cookie. After that, the page still loads with the full text in it, but a script hides the body and shows the subscription prompt.

Because the text is present for search engines, a reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does can extract the whole thing. In our latest test, a 940-word Wired security newsletter loaded in full, including the sign-off at the end that the meter normally hides.

How The Verge paywall works

The Verge's approach is different. Most of its news coverage remains free, and the subscription mainly gates longer features, some reviews and the ad-free experience. Gated articles show a preview and a prompt. The article body is still delivered in the page for indexing, so the reader handles those the same way. A 900-word Verge feature on AI security incidents came through complete in our test.

Read a Wired or Verge article in full

• Copy the article link from wired.com or theverge.com.
• Paste it into Skip the Paywall and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with headline, byline and complete text. Inline images are kept; embedded videos and tweets are removed.

Product reviews and buying guides

Wired's gear section and The Verge's reviews are heavy on image galleries, spec tables and embedded price widgets. The reader keeps the written review and strips the widgets, so you get the verdict and the reasoning but not the live price comparisons. For those, open the original page.

Other science and tech titles that work

We test a broad range of publications. At the time of writing, MIT Technology Review, New Scientist and Scientific American, all of which meter their sites, deliver full articles through the reader. Ars Technica and The Register remain free to read without any tool. The main exceptions in tech and business coverage are Bloomberg and The Information, both of which enforce their paywalls on the server and cannot be read this way. See our guide to metered versus hard paywalls for the full picture.

Why not just use reader mode in your browser?

Safari and Firefox reader modes reformat the page you have already loaded. On a metered site, the paywall script has usually already removed the text by the time reader mode runs, so you get the first few paragraphs and nothing else. Skip the Paywall fetches the page server-side, before any script runs, which is why it gets the full article.

If you read them every day

Wired's subscription is a few dollars a month and includes the print magazine; The Verge's is similar and removes ads. Both newsrooms do original reporting that costs money. Use the reader for the piece a friend sends you, and pay for the sites you rely on.