paywall

The virtual palisade paywall is first used to describe a membership-restricted sports website in 2004. The Wall Street Journal’s site had been paywalled since 1996, but this was such a rare practice that we didn’t need a word for it until much later. The Great Paywalling did not in fact begin until the early 2010s, when it became clear the previously dominant ad-supported model could not sustainably fund good journalism. For example, the NYT’s paywall went up in March 2011.

Paywall is obviously a compound of the common words pay- and -wall, but the choice of -wall in particular is influenced by the parallel firewall. Referring to computer security systems since 1971 and popularized in the 1983 hacker movie WarGames (“the only winning move is not to play”), a firewall referred to any system that separated unauthorized users from other critical systems. It settled on its current more specific meaning of a passive deterrence that blocks automated intrusions in the 1990s.

Firewall’s computer security meaning arose from a metaphor for its physical meaning, a fire-resistant barrier preventing the spread of fires by separating burnable things from each other. Uncontained, wildly spreading fires used to be a major problem for cities; firewalls, first attested in 1851, were one of many tools developed and deployed to combat this. The more general meaning of a protective barrier of any sort is from 1907.