Pay-walling

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Pay-walling or paywalling consists of the action of setting a restriction to part of the content from a software or a service that can be only accessed if the user pays a one-time purchase or a suscription. This restriction of features that require payment are known as paywalls. Paywalling is a very common practice on websites, video games and on software as a service.

How it works

Companies or developers can add or block features under a paywall in order to increase their revenue.

Why it is a problem

Monetization overload

Main article: Monetization overload

Aggressive paywalling could lead into monetization overload, paywalling a significative amount of the available content, even when similar content might be found for free.

Decrease of quality

Paywalls can block essential features that were originally for free, or even be more limited for users who already paid for them. In some cases, the usage of third-party software to bypass paywalls can penalize the user for doing so. An example for this is YouTube that restricts the amount of videos that someone can watch if the platform detects an ad-blocker running on the browser, forcing users to find another alternative or paying for Premium instead.

Affordability issues

Excessive paywalling can be an issue for people with a limited income, specially if the prices of the paywalls increase.

Examples

• Paywalls are a common thing in video games, specially in games targeted for mobile devices. Some paywalled things that are often paywalled are cosmetics and special features that cannot be obtained by playing a free-to-play user.
• Several newspaper websites paywall their articles by limiting the viewers the amount of articles they can read or by allowing them to see only a portion of the article. An open-source extension compatible with Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers allows to avoid paywalls from most of the newspaper websites.
• Consent-or-pay is an aggresive form of paywall used by some websites, disabling web trackers and cookies only if the user pays a suscription.