This morning I finally hit the 20 article monthly limit imposed by the new New York Times paywall, so on a whim I just deleted everything to the right of ".html" in the URL, hit return and voila: the article displays just fine. A few seconds of Googling shows that this is a pretty widely known technique.

More of a paycurb than a paywall.

Huh. So what's the point of putting up a paywall that's so easy to scale? Actually, I'm beginning to think it's a pretty damn good compromise on the part of the Times.

There are people—a lot of people—for whom even a mouse drag and a keystroke is too much trouble to read the paper. They'll either stop reading the Times, or they'll subscribe, just to be rid of the irritant. There are also a lot of people whose conscience won't let them resort to a free workaround. These are the low hanging fruit, what the folks at the Times refer to as "incremental revenue."

Then there are those of us who, if there's a way around the wall, we're gonna look for it, and likely find it. To borrow a metaphor from the immigration debate: Build a bigger wall, and we'll bring a taller ladder. Would the bean counters at the Times prefer we fork over our money? Of course. Do they really want to lose us as readers? No.

So in a way, the new paycurb is perfect. It's just high enough to nudge those who are willing to pay to do so, but not so high as to erode the Times' standing as our nation's online paper of record. It'll be interesting to see how that balance works out.