[thephyber]

Micropayments never took off. Advertising / freemium did. Why?

If your server doesn’t serve responses unless someone pays, then there is the problem of uncertainty for the client — how do I know the content behind the paywall is worth it?

Nearly all of the services we use that index the web are free/cheap and require the ability to crawl the web without logging into services. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu. LLMs like ChatGPT piggyback on CommonCrawl, in addition to paying for large expensive data contracts from companies like Reddit.

We have a word for the part of the internet that is walled off from open crawling — the Deep Web.