Paywall Index — September 2026

Key findings

• German-language outlets are the hardest to read for free. The typical German outlet opened 31% of the time, against 97% for Spanish.
• 7 major outlets never send the article to non-subscribers at all — the server stops after the opening, so no tool can show the rest: The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Washington Post, De Telegraaf, Die Welt, Barron's, Mediapart.
• Hardest to read free: De Morgen (0%), De Telegraaf (2%), The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) (3%).
• Most outlets open: the typical outlet we measured opened 90% of the time, and 32 of the 70 ranked outlets opened 95% of the time or more.

Hardest to read for free

Share of reads that delivered the article, lowest first. A hard subscription wall, bot protection, or both.

By language

The typical (median) outlet in each language, among outlets with 15+ reads — so one very popular outlet cannot stand in for a whole country.

Outlets that never send the article

Checked from a home connection: these send readers without a subscription only the headline and, at most, the opening — the rest of the article is never sent, so no paywall remover, extension or trick can show it. A public archive is the only route, when one exists.

The Wall Street Journal · The Times · The Washington Post · De Telegraaf · Die Welt · Barron's · Mediapart

Who blocks the archives

Public archives are the last free route to an article behind a hard wall, and some publishers turn them away. Wayback refused: of the Wayback Machine's own captures of the outlet's front page in this period, the share the publisher refused — bot protection, a login, or “402 Payment Required”, the pay-to-crawl answer (in brackets). Archive had the article: of our reads that had to go to a public archive, how often it held the full article rather than the paywall it was shown, or nothing.

Wayback captures checked 12 Oct 2026 from its public capture index; shown with 10+ front-page captures, and archive look-ups with 15+ reads. Every outlet is in the CSV and JSON.

Opened almost every time

Outlets where at least 99.5% of reads delivered the article (shown as 100%).

Daily Mail · El Confidencial · The New Yorker · HotNews · The Free Press · infoLibre · Las Provincias · Business Insider Polska · Scientific American · Onet Premium · WIRED · El Diario Montañés · Swindon Advertiser · Estadão

Most-read paywalled outlets

What people most wanted to read, and how often it opened.

All ranked outlets

70 outlets with 30+ reads, hardest first · CSV

How this is measured

Every figure comes from real, anonymous reads on RemovePaywall: someone pasted an article link and we tried to open it. A read counts as opened only if it delivered the article — the clean text, from the page itself or from a public archive (archive.today, the Wayback Machine). A preview, a framed page or a block counts as not opened, and for the 7 outlets above a read of the live page never counts, because that page is the preview.

This edition covers 19–30 Sep 2026, not the whole month: until 19 September our paywall detector only recognised English subscriber notices, so French, German and Dutch previews were counted as articles. Numbers from before that would not be comparable. Outlets are ranked with 30+ reads in the period. It measures how often a free tool got the article — the publisher's wall and its bot protection together — not what publishers report. Daily Mail made up 43% of all reads, which is why headline figures use the typical (median) outlet rather than an average.