Most paywalls just allow search engines to read their content just fine. Because they do want discoverability, they want their cake and eat it.
There's a few publications that don't even do that though and archive.is is very good at bypassing them so I do imagine they use logins for those, but for the masses of sites it's not currently necessary.
Google isn't the only search engine in the world of course. It probably is pretty much the only one that matters in America but the world is not just America either.
Me for one. Adding an auto-updating IP address blocker to my personal blog site would probably cost more than setting up the whole site did in the first place.
Have you actually priced it, or are you just guessing?
Are you doing regular patching? Automated restarts? Watching for security breaches? Or just praying it stays up forever?
Otherwise, respectfully, I would not classify you as a "serious operator." Your site could live or die, and it would be all the same to you. Or, you've handed it to a third party for management and they don't offer much in the way of resilience or stability.
We're talking about sites that make their living via subscriptions. They should have a great interest at blocking archive.is, which is, by the way, the only service that can reliably bypass many paywalls. Clearly whatever they're doing is not easily replicated.
> We're talking about sites that make their living via subscriptions.
Sorry, but I wasn't. I thought that was clear from "can't afford the cost of keeping up-to-date with the Google IP list".
> They should have a great interest at blocking archive.is
Agreed, and many should have a budget to suit. So I conclude archive.is has put a lot of effort and cost into its defence. And all for free to us, the users.
They have. It's called bypass-paywalls-clean . It works pretty ok.
It just keeps getting banned from the addon catalogs because of complaints from media. The Firefox one was taken down by a french newspaper. So you have to sideload it, which is hard to do on Android.
Hmm yeah but their adversaries did achieve their goal by pushing it away from the mainstream sites. Now we're into this situation of "how much do I trust this vague Russian site with my browsing activity".
At least the addon declares the sites it's for and ignores the rest but still I'm a lot less comfortable with it. It's more something I'd install in a container now, limiting its usefulness :(
There's a few publications that don't even do that though and archive.is is very good at bypassing them so I do imagine they use logins for those, but for the masses of sites it's not currently necessary.