Published in: newspaper

Bypass the paywall of The New York Times website by clearing browser cookies.

The New York Times has enabled their metered paywall in U.S. and all other countries. That means if you are to read stories on the nytimes.com website beyond your free quota, which is about 10 articles per calendar month, you’ll have to buy a digital subscription.

The details of the various subscription plans are available at nytimes.com/access. The basic plan costs around $15 per month and that will give you unlimited access to all content on the NYT website from your computer and your mobile phone. If you would like to read the NYT on a tablet, like the iPad, the plan is $20 per month.

Get Around the Times Paywall by Clearing Cookies

The New York Times currently uses browser cookies, and not IP addresses, to keep track of how many articles you have read on their online website. That means if you are reading the NYT articles in Google Chrome and then switch to Firefox or IE, the limit is reset to zero because cookies aren’t shared across browsers.

If you would like to stick with one browser, you can still get around the NYT paywall by clearing the cookies that are associated with nytimes.com (there’s no need to clear all the browser cookies). All web browsers let you remove cookies through their Privacy settings but a easier way to get this done is through a cookie bookmarklet.

To get started, drag and drop the following Paywall bookmarklet to your browser’s favorites bar. Then open any story on the New York Times website and hit the bookmarklet to reset your read counter to zero.

javascript : void ( ( function ( ) { var a , b , c , e , f ; f = 0 ; a = document . cookie . split ( "; " ) ; for ( e = 0 ; e < a . length && a [ e ] ; e ++ ) { f ++ ; for ( b = "." + location . host ; b ; b = b . replace ( /^(?:%5C.|[^%5C.]+)/ , "" ) ) { for ( c = location . pathname ; c ; c = c . replace ( /.$/ , "" ) ) { document . cookie = ( a [ e ] + "; domain=" + b + "; path=" + c + "; expires=" + new Date ( ( new Date ( ) ) . getTime ( ) - 1e11 ) . toGMTString ( ) ) ; } } } alert ( "Cleared " + f + " cookies" ) ; } ) ( ) )

Here’s a video demo:

You should only run the bookmarklet while you are on a page of nytimes.com. If you would like to know whether the cookies have been successfully cleared or not, copy-paste the following code into your browser’s address and hit enter.

javascript:alert(document.cookie)

The browser may also be set to completely disallow cookies from the nytimes.com domain but that won’t work because The New York Times website requires cookies.

Bypass the New York Times Paywall with Google

If the previous workaround isn’t working, you can easy bypass the Times paywall with Google as a proxy server. While you are on a Times web page, remove everything from the URL that’s after the ? (question mark).

Now replace nytimes.com in the following URL with the full URL of the story and it should open without issues in your browser.

The last workaround is Google search. Copy-paste the full title, or even the URL, of any NYT story into the Google search box and click on the first result. There’s a daily limit of 5 articles that you can read through Google beyond the free monthly limit.

Related reading: How to Find Old Newspaper Articles?