Isn't that the perennial problem even with sites like HN? A significant amount of people derive value from reading headlines and short snippets of content?

Isn't this also a method pay-walled sites use to get subscribers? Otherwise, why not just block Google in robots.txt?

They still want to be found. They just also want to be paid for the privilege of being listed on a search result page.

Google should just start putting a huge red box around pay walled articles. It would basically indicate "don't bother with this site"

As a user, i would actually love if Google had that feature natively. I assume there is a way to have that functionality already by using some browser extensions. But a native implementation by Google would be a killer feature imo.

Implementing it would essentially require the browser knowing if you have logins/subscriptions. Taken further they could personalize searches to only include paywalled sites if you have a login as opposed to marking them as "don't bother".

Google would only require 2 things. If a site has a paywallz and if the user whitelisted it. I have black listed most paywall sites manually on my Google feed. So they are obviously capable and already doing the latter.

And the blacklisting is easy. A click of the button and it's off my list

This is the best way to do it: just paywall your articles.

The internet made people believe everything is free. But free news is either propaganda or a disguised ad.

The problem is that they all have their own account management. I'd be ok with paying a subscription service that gave access to several sites and took care of distributing revenue per usage, but managing dozens of subscriptions is a hassle.

Pressreader offers something a bit like that.

I don't think that is a fair assessment, there is also free news that is openly ad-supported i.e. there are ads surrounding the news on the page, but the content itself is not advertising anything

Newspapers are actually not supported by ads, that was always merely a bonus. Most of their income came from subscriptions. Every serious journalist medium is going back to paywalls/subs. If people don't think its worth the money journalism should die but I think it will survive.

Unfortunately this is completely false. Biggest contributor used to be real estate, but other advertising was a big contributor.

> It's not that they're giving paid content away for free, it's that they're extracting copyrighted content and profiting from it (without compensating the copyright holder).

Wouldn't that imply that they simply have to pay to be displayed as it would be advertisement? Ergo they will get removed and not get any advertisement anymore as a result.