Blog Note: Part 7 - Free paywall added for subset of posts

Of the total current count of 505 published posts, I've recently modified 184 to be behind a free paywall that solely requires an email address to be considered a member. I have no plans to ever charge a fee to read members-only posts.

The sole reason I've made the hard decision to make use of the free paywall provided by Ghost is the apparent AI model training on my content. In December 2025, Google Analytics began showing a material surge in sub-second hits from China that was taking place on a daily basis (often hundreds of times) for several weeks in a row.

I've since noticed a drastic decline in this type of activity since putting the free paywall in place. A more drastic step that I've considered is Cloudfare implementation, but I'd like to see results from the free paywall before going in this direction.

The reasoning I used to choose which posts to place behind the free paywall is somewhat arbitrary, but chosen posts generally contain either significant custom content that took a long time to write, or information that I consider to be nontrivial that can't be easily found elsewhere, especially when my personal experience is being shared, and in both of these cases I know from Google Analytics that many of these posts were already amongst the most popular.

Unfortunately, this is the third way in which I've been negatively impacted by AI this past year, and I plan to dedicate a post to this topic in coming months. If you have any thoughts to share on this topic, I'll appreciate your comments. Thank you for your understanding.