this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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They do that to let search engines index their articles. Then they switch on the paywall an hour later or so but still get a lot of traffic (which is good for advertising) when people click on the link on Google etc.
The crawler identifies itself as a "robot" which can get past the paywall. When you browse using Chrome the site behaves differently. That's why it's so easy to get past by pasting the link into archive.ph
Or by using a browser addon that changes the way the browser identifies itself to pretend it's a search engine crawler.