Or stop talking about them. No but seriously I always wonder how other sites or workaround get taken down, but nobody cares about archive. I just hope it continues to stay under the radar.
vasco · 3h ago
The only long term solution is to stop sharing paywalled content.
PaulHoule · 1h ago
The dirty secret is that the news media needs archive.today in order to function. Anyone writing an article about subject Y needs to know what every paper wrote about it. Back in the 00's it got out that you could log into almost any newspaper web site with "media/media", something that got clamped down on when it got out.
You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.
If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
x______________ · 1h ago
Or create a deeper underground where the masses do not get involved?
Marsymars · 1h ago
There’s no real way to tell if the content you share today will be paywalled tomorrow.
Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
pseudo0 · 1h ago
The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because they allow people to exclude their public social media accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other one I was out of luck.
cobertos · 1h ago
What were you looking for that was prone to scrubbing? Just curious because I have a collection of historical data to go through and don't know what to expect
pseudo0 · 1h ago
In one case it was a personal website, the other was a Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.
Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.
We all hate adverts, some of us don't like or can't pay. Those who pay, have access to a few publications they enjoy. It would be absurd to pay for all the publications, all the streaming services, but we don't want monopolies either. What could be a solution for this madness?
sn9 · 3m ago
I would be fine with ads if I could block anything that wasn't a simple static image with an obvious link that's off to the side. The software equivalent of what newspaper ads used to be.
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
m82labs · 1h ago
I want RSS with micropayments. I want to consume information in my own interface, and am willing to pay. I am not willing to pay for a full subscription to a publication when I only find a few articles a year that I want to read.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
PaulHoule · 1h ago
There's that new thing CloudFlare has that lets you set a price for A.I. crawlers, maybe that could be used to set a price for anybody. If the price was reasonable at all I'd have my crawler pay it for maybe 300 articles a week.
NicuCalcea · 30m ago
Micropayments have been tried plenty of times and never succeeded. People say they'd be willing to pay, but they're not.
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
lblume · 2h ago
So instead of contributing to authors, you need to altruistically donate a large proportion of your money to Google in exchange for replacing a single kind of advert? Unlike some other Google products I can very easily see why this was discontinued...
AceJohnny2 · 1h ago
You're paying for websites by viewing their ads. You're paying with unsubstantial things like attention (and bandwidth), which through Google and other Ad providers gets converted to cash for the website.
Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
recursive · 1h ago
"Large portion"? I don't think it says that.
lblume · 1h ago
Well, if the revenue remains the same for the author, and it also doesn't decrease for Google, it is implied that their margin will have to also be paid by the person who donates, for else the calculation will not work.
yesfitz · 3h ago
If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card.
Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).
Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.
It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.
Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
sonofaragorn · 3h ago
That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
commandar · 2h ago
Kinda?
The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.
In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.
The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
bb88 · 1h ago
> The core idea behind BAT isn't bad
I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"
jhaile · 3h ago
I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.
jennyholzer · 3h ago
this creates massive incentives for clickbait
mrkramer · 2h ago
No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.
abxyz · 3h ago
The solution is comfort in going without.
Supermancho · 1h ago
The fun and innovation of circumvention will never get old. There is no comfort to be had in stagnation.
tshaddox · 1h ago
Note that this, like ad blocking or piracy, also doesn’t help fund the creators.
snihalani · 3h ago
I'd vote we build a spotify for new subscription where you get a share for views
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
spotify isn't sustainable as a primary income source for ~99% of artists on it
jennyholzer · 3h ago
Spotify is actively hostile to artists who intend to use it for income.
Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.
E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.
Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.
This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
jlarocco · 1h ago
I don't see the problem. Pay for the ones that you find valuable and ignore the rest.
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
dkarl · 3h ago
In one of his books about intellectual property law, Lawrence Lessig quoted an unnamed French lawmaker as saying, "There are two things Americans need to understand about art: art has nothing to do with money, and the artist must be paid!"
yorwba · 2h ago
Most news outlets publish basically the same information and only the arrangement and commentary are different. Sometimes they'll even brazenly report on other reporting, paraphrasing enough of the original article that you don't really need to read it anymore.
So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 2h ago
I just check reuters and apnews first these days to see what's going on before checking localized stuff.
hombre_fatal · 3h ago
It's a good question, and I can at least say something positive about every solution.
Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.
Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.
Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.
Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.
Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
useless_foghorn · 3h ago
I'd partake in a microtransaction system that pays based on the percentage of the article I finished. Some assurance of high-quality journalism would be helpful.
If HN existed as pay-to-play for instance (it probably wouldn't), I wouldn't be opposed to paying based on my usage for the curation - knowing that I'm supporting the creators/authors of the content I'm enjoying. I don't think an unlimited plan makes sense - instead pay per article. I think the amount you pay per should be chosen when you create your account, not every time you open an article. I think this is most fair to the creators and consumers with the least organizational bloat.
tempnew · 3h ago
“subscriptions like Apple News”
They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
ToucanLoucan · 3h ago
> Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read.
The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
I think the major issue is two-fold:
1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.
2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
phoronixrly · 3h ago
How about tasteful magazine-style ads interspersed in-between the article's text and meticulously inserted in a way that not even does not harm the UX/design but contributes to it. You know, like it used to be on printed media? Only in the case of the web, the ads must not be taking up most of the web page (like full-page magazine/newspaper ads), and definitely not the entire above-fold part of it.
And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.
Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
ABP, the original uBlock Origin, saw the writing on the wall a decade ago or whenever and tried to mediate a truce between users and advertisers.
ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.
People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.
I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.
But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
cwillu · 1h ago
My computer belongs to me and will display the things I tell it to display. If ABP gets in the way of that, then so long ABP.
NicuCalcea · 27m ago
I'm fine with this approach as long as it goes both ways. The media organisation's server is theirs, and if they want to put up a paywall or block clients with ad blockers, that's their prerogative.
cwillu · 16m ago
At no point does ublock force their server to perform work it wouldn't otherwise. “Blocking clients with ad blockers” isn't a thing, there is only “send information plus instructions for the client to block itself”, and “only send information to logged in users” (and if they're incapable of choosing trustworthy users, that is not my problem).
NicuCalcea · 3m ago
I didn't say anything about the server doing extra work? And server-side ad insertion definitely exists, but if you want to get pedantic about the delivery mechanism, that's fine, websites have the right to bundle their content with ads and code that makes their ads more difficult to block.
stonogo · 3h ago
You're sort of leaving out the fact that ABP launched its own ad network and advertisers had to pay them to get listed as 'acceptable.' It torpedoed their trustworthiness in the eyes of many.
ASalazarMX · 2h ago
Also, ABP made the setting silently opt-out instead of asking the users. That, and their new diametrically-opposite incentive of whitelisting ads for money made me bail from them.
If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
ACow_Adonis · 2h ago
Except its a bit like that PERL quote.
You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.
You think, I know, i'll use ads!
Now you have two problems.
Arubis · 3h ago
The business model is broken, and, arguably, so too is the business environment--there's many angles from which it appears capitalism is no longer serving the public good. If we replaced it with another -ism, what might it be, and how might that support information and knowledge for the public good?
piva00 · 2h ago
It's one space where I think some form of microtransaction (in the sub-cents USD) could work: I want to pay per article, not have yet another subscription in the 5-15 USD just because an article interested me.
Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.
I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
jlarocco · 1h ago
I think that argument is begging the question.
Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.
After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.
I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
morkalork · 4h ago
Obviously the solution is embedded video ads that float over top content that play with sound enabled by default and tiny little x button about 3 pixels wide and 50% transparent in one of the corners /s
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
Those of us old enough to remember newspapers hated when they did that.
Or, wait…
0x5FC3 · 4h ago
Just make the button work on the 3rd click, and count the other 2 as ad clicks.
humblebeekeeper · 3h ago
Ok, I guess I won't read content from News Media Alliance outlets. I think they are probably fine with that.
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
wasi_master said this the last time this project was posted -
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
reactordev · 3h ago
Not me jumping to the link only to realize I already have it stared ;)
Great work.
manquer · 3h ago
I am curious why these workarounds continue to work .
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
It can't be that easy, can it? Doesn't google bot have known ip ranges that publishers whitelist?
phoronixrly · 2h ago
It's not. In my experience they even completely block non-end-user IP ranges, and I'm not fond of being raided due to running this at home.
mrkramer · 3h ago
In the last 10 years or so companies and news outlets stared gravitating towards subscription based business model but people can't or don't want to subscribe to multiple different services(subscription fatigue). My prediction is that a lot of subscription based services will collapse and get replaced by microtransactions unless you offer something exceptional like Netflix, Spotify or World of Warcraft.
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
Gys · 2h ago
> replaced by microtransactions
I assume you mean micro payments?
Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
mrkramer · 1h ago
Yea, micropayments but people can't keep up with dozens subscriptions. Someone will figure out micropayments sooner or later.
I think the biggest issue is the _vast_ majority of news is noise. It won't effect you. Maybe you could argue we should be "aware" of certain events happening but I'd argue most only complicate your life.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
NicuCalcea · 21m ago
As a journalist, I think you're absolutely right, I've met lots of people who clearly won't benefit from reading the news.
musha68k · 4h ago
Streisand amplification in effect.
pentagrama · 2h ago
Bypass Paywalls Clean extension [1] still working and getting updates [2].
I use this all the time and it does work very well. You do have to update it (manually) on occasion though, sometimes it can break things if you don't.
tyzoid · 3h ago
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
Arubis · 3h ago
There's Apple News. They choose what you have access to, of course.
dwb · 3h ago
They serve you adverts even if you pay, so that disqualifies them for me.
vunderba · 2h ago
This. I trialed Apple News+ so I could read WSJ, Atlantic, New Yorker on my iPad via the native iOS app and immediately dropped my subscription when I started seeing ads sandwiched within the articles. Ridiculous.
Arubis · 3h ago
Interesting--that hasn't been my experience. I have a _lot_ of filtering layers; one or more of them might be catching those.
Aurornis · 3h ago
> I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~6/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
> How many sites would you end up splitting that across?
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.
immibis · 40m ago
Yes? If they show me one page per year, they can get a few cents per year. That's how it works. If they want more money, they should produce more content worth viewing.
morkalork · 3h ago
Like Spotify and how big name artists/record labels shaft all the individual content creators when it comes to revenue sharing. I do pay for Spotify regardless, I would pay about the same for the written equivalent. Not sure if that would be enough to sustain any real investigative journalism though
krunck · 3h ago
I'm not paying for subscriptions. I'll pay per article or not at all.
Raed667 · 3h ago
Was it ever publicly communicated how 12ft or archive.ph|is work? Or is it something they keep to themselves ?
strongpigeon · 3h ago
I think (in the case of 12ft) they were just impersonating Googlebot.
beejiu · 3h ago
That's surprising because Googlebot publishes IP ranges for its crawlers and it's fairly simple to block fake crawlers these days (super easy through Cloudflare, for example).
ewoodrich · 1h ago
In my experience 12ft.io was pretty much useless after a honeymoon period of a few months when it first came out so I wouldn't be surprised. The Googlebot method used to work with almost everything but at some point major news orgs caught on in quick succession and I gave up even bothering to try it.
Raed667 · 1h ago
doesn't google also run some "undercover" bots to verify that you don't serve very different versions of your website to users vs bots ?
cesarb · 1h ago
> they were just impersonating Googlebot.
Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
geegee3 · 3h ago
It hadn't worked for a long time.
corny · 2h ago
Check if your local library has a PressReader subscription. It doesn't help open links to paywalled articles, but depending on your library, you may already have access to a lot of newspapers and magazines.
lovelearning · 1h ago
If this News Media Alliance put some effort into enabling per-article micropayments or a prepaid credits system valid across all its members, there'd be fewer people looking to bypass paywalls.
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
Most media outlets these days are just a pile of dark patterns.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
rckt · 1h ago
Not sure how is this illegal. It’s like saying that listening to a song that is played anywhere, but your paid service is illegal.
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
varispeed · 3h ago
I would understand if media were actually working - reporting on local issues, exposing corruption or where things are not working for residents.
Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap.
We need to keep making more of these.
https://archive.ph/dSeku
You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.
If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.
https://commoncrawl.org
I would prefer more of these.
Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.
Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)
When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.
None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...
https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...
Anything with sound or motion, or popups, or interrupts my reading or viewing, or something that notably worsens my user experience, or basically any usage of dark patterns . . . I will block with impunity.
I want Spotify for text, but with a business model that makes sense for all involved.
The basic idea is that you as a user can also participate in the ads bidding, and if you wins, the ad space will be replaced by a static image. To the website owner this is revenue neutral.
I'm not sure why it was discontinued. I still have fond memories of this service.
Google Contributor offered you to pay cash directly, instead of attention. The website owner gets some of that cash, same as they would if you were shown an ad.
Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).
Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.
It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.
I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.
The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.
In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.
The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.
I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"
Spotify allocates a finite pool of funds to be paid out to artists. Spotify pays the artists whose work they host in proportion to the percentage of the platform's streams which that work generates.
E.G., say Spotify's users streamed 10B songs in 2024. If Taylor Swift is responsible for 1B (10%) of those streams, she would be paid 10% of Spotify's artist fund for 2024.
Recently, Spotify has attracted attention for promoting "ghost music" created en masse by in-house producers. this is done with particular intensity in non-vocal music styles, like ambient and jazz. See [The Ghosts in the Machine by Liz Pelly for Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...) for more details on this.
Spotify stuffs their promoted playlists with this music, and tunes their automated recommendation features to prioritize this music.
This has the dual effect of (1) inflating the number of streams on the platform, and (2) algorithmically crushing the possibility of discovery. This means Spotify cannot be used effectively for promotion (obviously excluding the top .01% most popular artists), and whatever traffic an artist is able to drive to Spotify is devalued.
Nobody needs, or is entitled to, everything.
So one subscription can be enough. Maybe get two at a time if you don't know yet which is best and need a direct comparison.
Ads let you make money long before you're big enough to compel subscriptions... but they basically make the least tech savvy people subsidize the rest of us which isn't fair.
Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read. Like a critical bit of investigative journalism.
Paywall + free articles per IP address (common solution) is almost good, but it requires every single content producer to polish the system, and IP address isn't the ideal fingerprint. Requiring everyone to quickly register (like Apple sign-in) seems decent, but once again now everyone has to polish this system. Though until you're big you could just use substack/wordpress/whatever.
Bundle subscriptions like Apple News is a decent solution—one of the few times I've paid for news—, but secures the domination for incumbents large enough to appear on Apple News. It doesn't answer the question for anyone else.
Microtransactions seem like they'd be a good way to throw some scraps to even tiny sites you visit once. But I think there's too much psychological overhead that isn't even worth the pennies. Like when you had to click the +1 Flattr button back in the day, even though it was a tiny donation, you'd still find yourself thinking if it was really worth it. Hmm I only read half the article, etc.
They will eventually start pushing ads. Just like Netflix, Amazon prime, etc… Paying a subscription to prevent ads is like paying a ransom: maybe you get lucky and they don’t come back for more in the future. But most all businesses seek growth, forever, so you probably end up with a low tier of a multi-tier subscription offering with ads and increasingly poor quality and costs that go up unexpectedly year on year.
The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.
I think the major issue is two-fold:
1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.
2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.
To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.
The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
And most importantly, the notion of paying for ads based on tracking impressions and/or any other ways of tracking users needs to die. Cue laughter from the ad-tech majority on this site.
Yes, I am adamant that advertisement contracts must not involve profiling/client-side tracking the end users and their browsers in any way. Ad agencies and news site companies/sites/what have you must work out between them (and possibly a third party) the expected amount of users that are going to see the ad and decide on price based on that, without any client-side tracking.
ABP would allow through ads that weren't egregious, and users could provide compensation for content they consumed.
People however either can't read or can't comprehend the writing on the wall, so instead they rioted against ABP and moved to uBlock Origin.
I know there are so many bad and greedy things that companies do. And we also talk about them a lot.
But we almost never talk about how greedy the end users are. And you cannot solve problems without understanding the full problem.
If at least they had made an easy to use panel to opt-in which kinds of ads you were OK with (Text ads, static images, animated images, silent videos, etc.), it would have helped their case a lot.
You have a problem. You want to figure out a way to get people to pay for things like news, investigative reporting, art, community and positive externalities.
You think, I know, i'll use ads!
Now you have two problems.
Media consumption habits changed a lot in the Internet-era, we read articles from many different publications, and only very few of those are of interest enough for someone to spend that amount per month. Instead having a pre-paid system I could top up for paying out per read would be very attractive to me to get rid of a paywall.
I just don't want more subscriptions, we really reached saturation with this model...
Media consumption habits changed because that's how the internet was foisted on people - not necesarily because anybody made a choice or were asked what their preferences were.
After 30 years on the internet, I've gone full circle. I don't want (and won't) pay per article. 99% of the news articles I read come from a handful of trusted websites (a couple of major news outlets, a couple of local news outlets, etc.) and I don't have any problem subscribing to them. There's too much garbage on the internet, and I want the gatekeeping.
I guess that puts sites like HN in an awkward position, though. Some of the content posted here is interesting, but rarely enough that I would pay to read it on some random site. If it's important enough, it'll show up on one of the news sites I pay for.
Or, wait…
I think about Steam a lot -- piracy goes down tremendously when it's easier and better to just not pirate games.
"Hello everyone, it's the author here. I initially created 13ft as a proof of concept, simply to test whether the idea would work. I never anticipated it would gain this much traction or become as popular as it has. I'm thrilled that so many of you have found it useful, and I'm truly grateful for all the support.
Regarding the limitations of this approach, I'm fully aware that it isn't perfect, and it was never intended to be. It was just a quick experiment to see if the concept was feasible—and it seems that, at least sometimes, it is. Thank you all for the continued support."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294067
Probably don't spend too much time getting this running, folks.
Great work.
If the content owners care so much about the paywall integrity they can verify if it is really google bot . Google provides a reverse dns lookup of the IP addresses of their bots[1]
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
Edit: Microtransactions as in micropayments.
I assume you mean micro payments?
Since the dawn of a more commercial internet (80's?) this has been pointed out as the holy grail, for example to replace ads and newspaper subscriptions. So how do you think this could now materialize? In general I think individual financial transactions are getting more expensive, making micro payments even more unlikely then ever before.
I would subscribe to a local news provider but I see no reason to ever subscribe to a national news outlet.
[1] https://gitflic.ru/user/magnolia1234
[2] https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...
There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
How many sites would you end up splitting that across? For people who click a lot of links on Hacker News or other social media that could be a dozen or more, easily. Depending on your clicking patterns that could descend into sub-$1 amounts
Meanwhile sites like the New York Times charge $25/month and don’t have to split it with anyone.
I think all of the micropayment or pass-type ideas suffer from the same problem: The dollar amounts people imagine paying are an order of magnitude less than what sites are already charging their customers. There’s a secondary problem where many of the people (not you specifically, just in general) who claim they’d pay for such a pass would move the goalposts as soon as it was available: Either it’s too expensive, they just don’t feel like paying it, or they come up with another justification to continue using paywall bypasses instead of paying anything.
For news? Two, I guess.
My newspaper used to have two sources: local news from their local reporters, and then AP stuff.
Which is something that shouldn't work. Google used to require sites to show the same thing to Googlebot and normal users; cloaking used to be banned. Were Google still enforcing that rule, these sites would have been removed from its index.
My local newspaper charges $1/4-weeks for N months, then rockets to $30/4-weeks after (and it still has ads and an absurd number of trackers!). There are 13 4-week spans in a year, rather than the usual 12 months everyone else prices on.
If you try to cancel online they give you repeat offers to temporarily lower the price back to $4/mo (until recently you couldn't cancel online at all).
If they just charged $5/mo forever and removed ads for it, I'd probably subscribe perpetually... but instead I don't even bother with their nonsense and use a combination of archive.is and reader mode to steal it. I can get 1/3 of their content online free anyway from AP News directly.
Anything public and online is accesible. These guys just motivated a bunch of other people to build more tools to fuck with paywalls.
Reality is that current media are mouthpieces of the rich designed to make us act against our own interest and help widen the wealth gap.
These media companies are parasites.