Why do certain companies keep paid content "accessible" through third party sites or addons? - eviltoast

Most major news sites, as well as some other sites of reading content like Medium, have a paywall for certain articles, but those are easily defeated by people who bother to search the internet.

As I suspect said companies are aware of that, and they don’t react to properly protect their paid stuff, what do they expect to gain?

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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    5 months ago

    Those are typically explicitly allowed through for various reasons. They want people to pay, but they also don’t want to stop Google/Bing and others from indexing it, and also archive sites. Which is why often people go through archive sites to bypass the paywalls, those can get a clean copy of the article and redistribute it.

    It’s not a big problem enough that they’re probably deeming the loophole acceptable as most people still end up paying for it.