In March the New York Times rolled out a paywall that limits free users to 20 articles per month. Seeing their success, now the Onion is also experimenting with a paywall of its own for non-U.S. visitors.
The Onion paywall is apparently modeled on the NY Times paywall, so that people can still feel comfortable passing around links and stuff. Though the Onion’s paywall limit seem pretty low when compared to NY Times’. Users who want to read more than five articles within 30 days are asked to pay either $2.95 per month or $29.95 annually (though, again, that may change as tests go on).
How to Block the Onion Paywall
The Onion paywall is powered by Press+, as visible in the screenshot above, and just like the initial version of NY Times paywall, the content is simply hidden behind a pop-up. To disable that pop-up box, just block the following URL with any adblocker browser extension.
http://s.ppjol.net/pp.js
And you’re done.
If you don’t want to install a browser extension, then simply close the paywall by clicking on the “x” and quickly press the ‘Esc’ key before you are re-directed to the homepage.
You could also just browse the Onion website in ‘incognito’ or ‘private’ browser mode to prevent tracking cookies from being permanently stored.
One thought on “Block The Onion Paywall”
You can also put a Host entry in for S.PPJOL.net pointing to 127.0.0.1 and it will serve the same purpose. Looks like many newspapers are using this same service.