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Pay Walled

Loved reading this post about Apple News articles - ultimate clickbait headlines, always behind a paywall. The only exception is when the news is really bad and all over the place already. There is not much to bait and switch over. Other outlets are pumping out minute by minute updates - then the Apple News story is no longer paywalled. Devious and ridiculous both come to mind each time I run into this. 

I start this game of cat and mouse when you least expect it: You’ve swiped right to search for an unused app on your phone that you’re convinced you have somewhere. I lure you in with my headline: “Oolong Tea Is Having Extreme Effects on Health.” Yeah, I knew you’d be interested. You love oolong tea. I’ve been waiting for you. You click, and that’s when I show myself for the first time: This Article Is Only Available to Apple News+ Subscribers, of which you are not one. Nice try. “You can look, but don’t touch,”

Very occasionally, I've been able to find the story on Wayback machine. But the chances of that happening are so slim that mostly I don't bother. But the fact that the paywalled person would make a few different attempts to read the thing they were blocked from reading proves that their headline writing is spot-on. It gets people hooked and if some of us will make the mistake of subscribing. When the numbers are that large, those mistakes add up big. 



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