Is It Paywalled? Tell Before You Click

The practical version of how to tell if an article is paywalled is four signals you can read before the page ever loads: which outlet published it, how the summary is written, whether the link carries a subscriber marker, and whether the story is exclusive. There are only three kinds of wall in circulation — open, metered and hard — and each behaves in a way you can predict. Learning the difference takes about a week of paying attention and saves a tap on every headline afterwards.

How do you tell if an article is paywalled before clicking?

Read the outlet first and the summary second. Outlets are consistent — a paper that metered you in March will meter you in October — and a hard wall almost always syndicates a promotional teaser rather than a real first paragraph.

Most people read from a pool of five to ten sources, which is a very short list to learn. Once you know that three of yours are open, one meters and one is locked, the guessing stops. This page is about identifying the wall, not about getting past it; the legitimate routes around one are collected in the honest guide to reading a locked story for free.

What are the three kinds of paywall?

Research on publisher pay models has settled on the same small taxonomy for years. The Reuters Institute's survey of 171 news outlets across six European countries sorted their walls into freemium, metered and hard, and those are still the three names American publishers use. A later study of 212 leading outlets in the United States and six EU countries found that 53% published with no wall at all, and that hard walls stayed rare even where a pay model existed: 76% of leading US newspapers ran one, and almost none of them blocked everything from the first word.

Open

No wall. The article loads for anyone, every time.

This covers public broadcasters, nonprofit newsrooms, most digital-born outlets and a good number of ad-funded commercial sites. It also covers more than people expect from papers that lock everything else: breaking news, obituaries, live blogs and weather are frequently kept outside the wall on purpose.

How it behaves: the page loads, you read, nothing interrupts.

Metered

A set number of articles per period, then the wall drops.

The counter usually lives in a cookie on your device, which is why it resets when you clear browser data or open a private window. Some outlets instead count against a registered account on their own servers, which is the freemium end of the same idea: the article is free, the identity is the price.

How it behaves: the first few articles load completely. A later one loads, you begin reading, and a panel slides up mid-article. The tell is that you got real content first — a meter is a budget, not a lock.

Hard

Subscribers only, from the first word.

The article text is never sent to your browser. There is no counter to reset, no private window that helps and no overlay to dismiss, because there is nothing underneath it.

How it behaves: a headline, a summary of one or two sentences, an offer. Paragraph four does not exist on your device.

Which four signals identify each kind from the link?

1. The outlet's model

This is the signal that actually works, and it costs nothing after the first week. Outlets change their pay model roughly never — certainly not between Tuesday and Thursday. Learn your five to ten, and four out of five headlines are pre-sorted.

2. How the summary is written

A hard paywall usually syndicates a short, promotional summary, written to sell the click. Open and metered outlets tend to syndicate a real first paragraph, because they have no reason to hold anything back.

If the summary reads like an advertisement for the article rather than the beginning of it, expect a wall. This one tell is worth more than the other three combined, and it works in any feed reader, any newsletter and any search result.

3. The subscriber marker

Many outlets label their own links: a padlock, a diamond, a small "for subscribers" tag. It is easy to miss once and impossible to un-see afterwards.

4. Whether the story is exclusive

Original investigations, long features and named columns are what publishers protect, because they are expensive and they are the reason anyone subscribes. A result half the country is also covering — an election tally, a rate decision, a disaster — is usually open somewhere, because there is no exclusivity to defend.

That is the whole of how to tell if an article is paywalled before you spend the tap. The more newsrooms on a story, the less likely you need to pay for it.

What should you do with an open, metered or hard page?

Kind	What you are looking at	What to do
Open	The full article, no counter	Read it
Metered	Real text, then a panel	Decide whether it is worth a monthly slot; if you spend slots on the same outlet every month, the subscription is cheaper than the friction
Hard	Headline, teaser, offer	Check who else covered the event; if nobody did, that exclusivity is what a subscription buys

Most readers land on the middle row far more often than they expect, and most of them decline. The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report puts the share of people paying for online news at 17% across its twenty-market comparison, a figure that has barely moved in years. A meter is therefore aimed at the small minority who will convert; for everyone else it is a monthly allowance to spend deliberately rather than burn on the first three headlines of the month.

One reliable escape belongs in a sentence rather than a section: a story about US politics is also written up in English by newsrooms outside the country, usually with no wall. Which kinds of news sites stay free covers that category properly, along with wire copies and nonprofit newsrooms.

How does a reader that tags access type change this?

It moves the judgment upstream, so the sorting happens before you see the card rather than after you tap it. GetMyNews tags every feed in its registry by access type — free, metered or paywall — and that tag comes from the registry itself, not from a guess made per article.

The numbers are specific. The app reads 92 public RSS feeds from 37 US newsrooms; 16 of those feeds are tagged as hard paywalls and 2 as metered, and the rest are free. The ranking code then applies a −1.2 penalty to a paywalled feed and −0.5 to a metered one, which is why open newsrooms tend to arrive near the top of a deck rather than buried in it.

Each card still carries the headline, the publisher's syndicated summary, the image and the outlet name, so the four signals above remain yours to apply. Tapping opens the publisher's own page in the phone's browser, with your own session — if you subscribe to that paper, you are signed in and you get the piece you pay for.

When several newsrooms cover the same event, GetMyNews groups them into one card that still lists who else is reporting it. A locked article and an open one about the same story end up side by side, which turns a wall into a choice. That grouping is a property of reading feeds rather than a proprietary trick, and why RSS is still the plumbing under all of this explains where the summaries come from.

The deck is US newsrooms in English, in batches of about twenty cards that end. There is no account, and the app is free on Google Play for Android, funded by a banner plus one full-screen ad roughly every twenty stories.

FAQ

Is a soft paywall the same as a metered paywall?

Almost, and the vocabulary is loose. "Soft" is the informal umbrella for any wall you can reach content through — a meter that gives you a few free articles, or a freemium model where some sections are open and others are not. "Metered" names the specific mechanism: a counter, usually stored on your device, that allows a set number of reads before the panel appears.

Why do some outlets keep breaking news outside the wall?

Because breaking news is the least exclusive thing a newsroom publishes and the most effective thing it can use to recruit readers. A rate decision or a storm warning is being covered by everyone within the hour, so locking it earns nothing and costs reach. Obituaries, live blogs and weather stay open for the same reason: they bring people in, and the subscription pitch comes later.