Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Paywall page from The Advertister Paywalls  have become increasingly notable in the Internet Archive over the past few years. In our recent investigation into news similarity for U.S. news outlets, we chose from a list of websites and then pulled the top stories. We did not initially include subscriber based sites, such as The Financial Times  or Wall Street Journal , because these sites only provided snippets of an article, and then users would be confronted with a "Subscribe Now" sign to view the remaining content. The New York Times , as well as other news sites, also have subscriber based content but access is only limited once a user has exceeded a set number of stories seen. In our study of 30 days of news sites, we found 24 URIs that were deemed to be paywalls, and these are listed below: Memento Responses All of these URIs point to the Internet Archive but result in an HTTP status code of 404. We took all of these URI-Ms from the homepage of thei...