Two Paywall Software Providers Circumvent Cookies in Metered Paywalls

Like all other online technology, paywall platforms seem to be ever-evolving. This week, Tinypass, a Web software company that helps manage paywalls for small

Like all other online technology, paywall platforms seem to be ever-evolving.This week, Tinypass, a Web software company that helps manage paywalls for small publishers, announced that its rolling out a metered paywall option for its clients.The new meter function will be offered as a plugin for WordPress or Drupal platforms, or a separate API, and publishers can choose to run the meter by number of articles retrieved or by time frame (e.g., 24 hours). But most interesting, the software allows publishers the option to set up the paywall in two ways:

  1. Client-side, which requires adding a cookie to a user’s computer.
  2. Server-side, which a user can’t circumvent by clearing cookies.

The server-side option is an interesting one, as the biggest obstacle (from a technology standpoint) to monetizing online content is that metered paywalls are easy to circumvent.In fact, national paywall provider Piano Media is looking into the same technology. The company just announced via a press release that it is acquiring Novosense, an Austrian software company that has developed “cookie-free tracking of internet users.” This technology will be incorporated into Piano Solo, a technology that allows individual publishers to use the Piano Media technology to create individual paywalled sites (instead of the national paywalls Piano Media has created in Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia).Does your paywall provider allow you to create cookie-less meters?

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