Pay-walling

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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

In order to increase their revenue, several companies or developers have embraced the pay-walling practices.

Some companies set paywalls since the release of their products or services but there are also some of them that set paywalls after some time.

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 features that are often paywalled are cosmetics, and characters or items with powerful attributes that cannot be obtained by playing as a free-to-play user.
• Several newspaper websites paywall their articles by limiting the viewers the amount of articles they can read for free 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 aggressive form of paywalling user privacy that is used by some websites. The sites that use this method only allow to disable web tracking and cookies if the user pays for a subscription.
• Tesla has locked some car features that used to be free, such as full-self driving features under a subscription paywall and additional horsepower under a $2000 one-time purchase paywall.