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Huh. Is there no meta field for "This is a subscription site and here is how you pay for it"? What if I want to build a news parsing robot that can pay for entry?
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*skims documentation*
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In fact, is there any platform that would allow a client to pay programmatically? If I did make a bot that payed for access to the news, is there even a methodology by which it could? Why not?
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Also, wouldn't a meta field by which a robot could tell this is a subscription site be a good trust indicator, or at least tell spiders why your content is inaccessible?
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I mean... lol what if we had a standard by which we could paywall spiders in the 90s? Could you imagine if we started off putting news on the internet for free, but blocking it from Google unless Google paid for access? That's a fun alternate history to meditate on.
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Or alternative: if there is a meta value for 'here's the subscription page, pay me', you could negotiate a protocol by which aggregaters automatically promote your paywall instead of negotiating per-platform methods as we do now.
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Imagine the following aggregation-display flow: Retrieve Partial Article, Paywall endpoint -> Prompt user to pay through whatever methodology the platform prefers. -> Payment passed from platform to outlet -> API Query returns the rest of the article immediately.
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Platform agnostic paywalling... why is this not a thing?
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Looks like this idea has come up, but not been fleshed out by the w3c. What committee is working on this and how can I get on it? kshay/961253314196328448
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There *is* a schema(dot)org markup for paywalled content, but it doesn't provide a property for where resolving a paywall can be done. developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/paywalled-content
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But seriously: I want to build a robot aggregation tool that respects paywalled content and--at the very least--promotes the paywalls of the sites it presents.