I think my biggest issue with paywalls is that I wouldn't mind it if they showed the search engine only what the viewer can see as well. Then the search engines

I think my biggest issue with paywalls is that I wouldn't mind it if they showed the search engine only what the viewer can see as well. Then the search engines can try to prioritize the content that the user actually wants to see. As it is now, though, sites will often show the search engine different content than what's revealed to the user. Which is against the terms and conditions of most search engines (known as "cloaking"). Many of the paywall-bypassing software just let the user see what they freely serve up to the search engines. It wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't know how much effort was put into not only serving different content to the spider, but also how much effort is put into trying to make sure the search engine doesn't detect that they're doing it.