Most major news sites, as well as some other sites of reading content like Medium, have a paywall for certain articles, but those are easily defeated by people who bother to search the internet.
As I suspect said companies are aware of that, and they don’t react to properly protect their paid stuff, what do they expect to gain?
The people bypassing the paywall aren’t going to pay in the first place, no point in wasting resources on it.
Bandwidth isn’t free, though I guess the amount of bypassers register as a cost in dimes in that regard
At scale, it’s effectively free.
If you use a middleman such as archive.is it’s not their bandwidth anymore but the middleman’s. In most cases these services don’t act as a proxy but store a backup of the article on their servers. Not sure if that’s always the case though.