Why is such a brilliant site free ?
The simple answer is that I started it out as free, and because the majority of the material in the site is from other free sources rather than original to me I feel I have no right to ask people to pay me to see it, even if by re-presenting it in a unique and I hope interesting way I’ve significantly “value-added” to the originals. There’s also the little matter of aggressively enforced copyright if you try to make a living from publishing other people’s work. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with websites protected by AVS systems, except that they have proliferated ridiculously to a point where Sod’s Law says that the site you really want to see only accepts the one AVS you haven’t got ! That’s why I virtually never link AVS-protected sites, I don’t visit them myself and I never use material from them unless I’ve found it on a free site. This isn’t about restricting site visits from under-age surfers, either, as the AVS owners often claim, but purely about making money from their
