Download websites that use Piano

About Piano

A paywall is a business model rendered as software, and the software has to run in the reader's browser to decide what the reader is allowed to see. Piano sells into that trade, filed here under Personalisation because the platform that meters articles also runs the registration prompts, the offers and the campaign logic behind them. Detection says something unusually concrete about a site as a result: the operator is not merely publishing, but converting readers into accounts and accounts into payments.

The product name is an ordinary English word, and more than one thing in the world carries it. Our figure counts a fingerprint match against the vendor's own delivery code, not every appearance of the word, so a site that simply mentions the instrument is not in the count. Where a shared name creates genuine doubt, stating the ambiguity is better than rounding it away.

The vendor of record is Piano, licensing is Proprietary, and the platform dates to 2011, which puts its origins after the first newspaper metering experiments and inside the period when subscription tooling became something publishers bought instead of built. Buying rather than building matters to anyone reading this dataset. A house-built paywall leaves an idiosyncratic trace that no index can generalise across publishers, while a purchased one leaves the same vendor trace on every customer, which is why commercial platforms are countable in aggregate and in-house systems are not.

There is a second limit worth stating. Consent tooling, tag managers and edge rules all decide whether a script loads on any given visit, and paywall code is often the last thing to arrive on a page. A crawler that does not behave like a returning reader will sometimes miss it entirely, so the population we can see leans toward sites that embed the vendor's code directly in their markup.

As of September 2026 the tag appears on 141 sites, a modest number that fits a platform sold to publishers with real subscription operations rather than to every site with a newsletter. For a competing vendor, an analytics supplier or an agency pitching retention work, the domain list is the object of value. Checking one publisher's paywall vendor takes a browser and a private window. Assembling the full set, watching which titles appear and disappear between exports, and reading it against the advertising and analytics stack on the same pages is the part a per-domain lookup cannot do at any price.