A paywall is a payment wall
With a PayWall, it's important that you only get access to information if you pay: This can be one-off for one piece of information, the article, or it can be through a subscription. The paywall is mainly used in newspapers, often you will see a small introduction (to convince you of the fact that the article is worth the money) but the rest can only be seen when you get paid. It is a model that was introduced when it appeared that due to the online presence of newspapers there was less and fewer money entered by the publishers. When people also went to adblockers user also fell away the advertising revenues and there was no other possibility for some providers of information to exist, one had to ask for money for the information. Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SQiUQSxYow