Fake Newspaper Testing Out Very Real Pay Wall

Frequent readers of The Onion’s website may soon be forced to ante up if they want to keep up their regular dose of guffaws from fake news. The company has announced it’s testing out a pay wall that would require payment from overseas readers or limit them to only a handful of articles per month.

According to the Onion’s sister site, The Onion AV Club (which will not be affected by the pay wall), overseas readers will have access to five premium stories for free every 30 days (visits to the home page and section pages do no count) before being asked to pay a monthly fee of $2.95 or $29.95 for a year of unfettered access.

More from the AV Club:

It also won’t apply to areas where a lot of American troops are deployed in combat, as The Onion recognizes that it has a large fanbase in the armed forces, and it doesn’t wish to charge them for being overseas. They also have better stuff to worry about.

If this model is successful in finding enough paying readers in the UK and elsewhere across the pond, we could soon be facing the same wall here in the U.S.

About The Onion’s new paid content system… [AVclub.com]

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