The WordPress plugin

Accept readers who hold an account at any other newspaper in the network, and get paid for what they read — without ever learning who they are.

Download newshare-network.zip ↓

What each screen means — the gate, the receipts, spending limits, and what your own readers see (or do not).

What it does

A reader arrives at your site from somewhere else. She has no account with you and is not going to make one for a single article. Today she leaves.

With this plugin she can sign in using an account she already holds at another newspaper — her home base — and her home base pays you for what she reads. She never registers with you, never gives you a password, and you never learn her name. You are paid the price you asked for.

The arrangement is the one card networks use. Your bank issues your card; a shop accepts it without ever meeting you; a clearing house settles between them. Here the home base is the bank, you are the shop, and ITEGA governs the scheme without operating any part of it.

Installing

1. WordPress admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin
2. Choose the zip, install, activate
3. Open your site in a private window and read a few articles. Nothing should look different — that is demo mode doing its job.

There is nothing to type. No member ID, no API key, no settings form to fill in before it will work.

How it configures itself

ITEGA registers your domains when it certifies you. A few seconds after activation the plugin asks for its own credentials, and proves it is entitled to them:

1. It picks a random nonce and publishes it at /.well-known/newshare-challenge on your site
2. It asks network.itega.org to provision the domain
3. ITEGA fetches that URL over HTTPS and checks the nonce matches
4. Only then does it return your Publishing Member ID and your API key

This is the same challenge Let's Encrypt uses to issue a certificate, and for the same reason: anyone can claim to be your domain, but only your site can answer for it. Nothing secret travels in either direction, and no credentials are inside the download — which matters, because the download is public.

Because control is re-proved every time, reinstalling works. There is nothing to unlock and nobody to ask.

Demo mode

Demo mode suppresses every reader-facing behaviour unless the visitor has opted in with a key you choose. With it on and the key blank — how this build ships — nobody can opt in at all.

To run a demonstration, set a key under Settings → Newshare Network, then append it to any URL:

https://your-site.org/some-story/?newshare_demo=YOURKEY

That sets a first-party cookie so the rest of the walkthrough behaves normally. ?newshare_demo=off clears it.

Every uncertain case resolves to “ordinary reader, leave alone”: a missing key, a blank key, a wrong key, a malformed cookie. The worst outcome of a bug here is that your demonstration does not run — never that a paying reader hits a wall.

When you are ready to go live for everyone, turn demo mode off. Until then it is a switch you control, not a promise we made.

What a reader sees

Nothing at all, for the first few articles. The meter ships at three free reads; the fourth stops partway and offers two doors: subscribe to you, or sign in with a network account.

If she takes the network door she is asked one question — which organisation does she already belong to — and is sent to her own home base's login page, which she recognises. She signs in there, with her own password, and comes straight back to the article, which loads in full.

At the next network newspaper she visits, she is asked nothing at all.

Setting prices

Prices are yours. They are set on your site, in your WordPress, and nothing about pricing lives anywhere else.

Where	What
Page class, per post	What you are asking for that article. Whatever you type is what you are paid.
Default page class	Used for any article you have not priced individually. Ships at 0.05.
Minimum page class	The lowest counter-offer you will accept. Ships at 0.02.
Posted price is final	Turns negotiation off. Your price is take it or leave it.
Required bits, per post	4096 gates an article to paid subscribers. 0 leaves it free.

A home base may accept your price, counter it, or decline. You decide whether to meet a counter-offer; below your minimum it is refused automatically.

How you get paid

You are paid your asking price — the wholesale price. What the reader is billed is that figure multiplied by her home base's own markup, and that markup is the home base's margin. You are not told what it is, and you are paid the same whichever home base she belongs to.

So a nickel article earns you a nickel from every reader, while one reader might be billed 5.5¢ and another 7¢. That difference is not yours and it is not ours; it is what the home base charges for keeping the account, handling the billing and carrying the risk.

Purchases are aggregated and settled periodically rather than moving a nickel at a time. Both you and the home base file your own record of every transaction, so the totals can be audited from two independent sides.

What you learn about readers

Very little, on purpose. For each reader your site receives an opaque identifier, which home base vouches for her, what tier she holds, and an expiry. No name, no email address, no location, and no record of what she has read anywhere else.

{
  "networkUserId":  "948afc06-d2ed-340c-b45b-b13c178323b5",
  "homeBaseId":     "HB001",
  "networkGroupId": 4096,
  "pubMbrId":       "ITEGA-PA-0001",
  "exp":            1755380191
}

That identifier is yours alone. The same reader appears at another newspaper under a completely different one, derived from a secret only her home base holds. Two publishers comparing notes cannot tell they share a reader. This is not a policy we promise to keep — it is arithmetic, and it is why the network can be trusted by people who would not trust a platform.

AI answer engines

The plugin also answers machines. A crawler that is not a network member is refused with 403 and told where to join. A member that has not agreed a price gets 402 quoting your rate. One that accepts is served, and receives a grant letting it continue until the grant expires.

The same prices apply. An answer engine that wants your reporting can buy it on the terms you set, which is the alternative to it simply taking the content.

What gets recorded

One event per access: the opaque reader identifier, which home base, which article, the price, and a timestamp. It goes to the exchange's logging service over HTTPS with your own API key.

Your key can only file events under your own Publishing Member ID. It cannot be used to write records attributed to another publisher, and no other publisher's key can write records attributed to you.

You can pull your own totals at any time. Publishers receive aggregates; the detailed clickstream goes only to the home base whose reader it is, and the markup never appears in your copy at all.

Every setting

Setting	Ships as	What it does
Publishing Member ID	filled automatically	Who you are to the network
Exchange API key	filled automatically	Authenticates your event reports
Demo mode	on	Suppresses everything for ordinary readers
Demonstration key	blank	The key that opts a visitor in
Free article count	3	Reads before the meter closes
Default page class	0.05	Asking price for unpriced articles
Premium page class	0.20	Suggested rate for premium pieces
Minimum page class	0.02	Lowest counter-offer accepted
Posted price is final	off	Refuse to negotiate
Default required bits	0	0 free; 4096 paid subscribers
Default RSL tag	CC-BY-NC	Rights tag published with your content

If you would rather your credentials never sat in the database, define them in wp-config.php instead — these win over the settings page:

define( 'NEWSHARE_PUB_MBR_ID',  'ITEGA-XX-0000' );
define( 'NEWSHARE_ALS_API_KEY', '...' );

Troubleshooting

“Could not verify control of <domain>”

ITEGA could not fetch /.well-known/newshare-challenge from your site. Check the URL loads over HTTPS from outside your network, returns plain text, and does not redirect. Sites behind a staging password or an IP allowlist will fail this until they are reachable.

“<domain> is not registered with ITEGA”

Your domain has not been certified, or your site reports a different host than the one registered — a www. difference is handled, but a different domain entirely is not. Contact ITEGA.

No gate appears

Expected, if demo mode is on and you have not appended your key. Otherwise check that the article has a page class and required bits set, and that you have exhausted the free article count — a single anonymous request proves nothing, because the first three reads are free by design.

Everything looks configured but nothing is logged

Use Test Connection on the settings page. It fetches the list of home bases and will tell you which hop is failing.

Turning it off

Deactivate the plugin. Nothing is left behind that affects your pages, and your settings are preserved if you reactivate. Your credentials remain valid; you do not need to be re-registered.