If you read news articles online somewhat frequently, from major publications like the New York Times or the Globe and Mail, you’ve probably encountered a Pay Wall (or PayWall). I did some searching online to find the best ways to get around them and I thought I would share with you the easiest way to get around PayWalls.

The answer: Private Browsing.

If you search the Internet for ways to get around PayWalls you will find a number of different solutions, some of which are very simple, and some of which are overly complicated. Common solutions include:

Using a VPN

Clearing your cookies

Using Private Browsing

Private browsing is by far the easiest way to get around most of these pay walls because all you have to do is turn on private browsing, which is made easily accessible in most modern browsers. Both chrome and Firefox, for example, have the ability to enter private browsing mode simply by opening the menu and selecting “start private browsing” or “new incognito mode” in Chrome.

Private browsing works by not saving any of your history or your cookies when you’re browsing websites. This means that sites that use cookies to track how many articles you’ve read over time will not be able to do so.

So far I have tested the private browsing technique on both the Globe and Mail in the New York Times and it works flawlessly. After hitting the pay wall I switch to private browsing and was immediately able to access other articles. As long as you stay in private browsing mode you should be able to look at as many articles as you want without any problem.

Of course there may be some sites that use more sophisticated techniques for tracking your browsing, however, if it works for the Globe and Mail and the New York Times it will likely work for most.

Enjoy!