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

Opened every time

Outlets where every read delivered the article (soft or metered walls, where the text is already in the page).

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.