And I bet they are being hammered by scraping bots who doesn't realise this fact or can't download a torrent. Meta is having big problems because they were caught downloading the torrents.

I bet many scraping companies are trying very hard to pretend they don't know what they are ingesting, they had "no idea" they were scraping AA , they just implemented all the AA specific anti-anti-bot things as part of their normal attempts to bypass the wishes of the content producers.

I don't see how paying AA for access would be possible for these, but if AA gets a bit of extra donations then that's a win.