Why do certain companies keep paid content "accessible" through third party sites or addons? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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?

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[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 4 points 4 months ago

Bandwidth isn't free, though I guess the amount of bypassers register as a cost in dimes in that regard

[-] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago

At scale, it’s effectively free.

[-] rbn@sopuli.xyz 4 points 4 months ago

If you use a middleman such as archive.is it's not their bandwidth anymore but the middleman's. In most cases these services don't act as a proxy but store a backup of the article on their servers. Not sure if that's always the case though.

this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024

48 points (98.0% liked)

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