Paywall-Circumventing Site 12ft.io Shut Down

The News/Media Alliance , an association representing over 2,200 U.S. publishers, has secured the shutdown of the site 12ft.io (12ft Ladder), which allowed users to bypass the paywall and thus access online articles without a subscription. Subscriptions represent an alternative or additional source of revenue to advertising.

Collapse of visits and earnings for publishers

As data published by the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority (AGCOM) shows, sales of paper copies of newspapers continue to decline, while those of digital copies are increasing. The latter therefore represent an important source of revenue.

Almost all publishers (including Italian ones) offer free articles and some paid articles. In the first case, however, you must accept cookies to enable personalized ads (the Italian Data Protection Authority has launched a consultation on this business model, which ENPA and EMMA consider legal). In the second case, you must purchase a subscription .

The paywall will likely become more widely used, as Google has decided to integrate AI features into its search engine (AI Overview and AI Mode), whose impact on site traffic is already quite noticeable . Users read article summaries and no longer visit the source. They have also recently been added to the Discover feature (currently only in the United States).

Various tools have emerged to circumvent the paywall, one of which was 12ft.io, developed by Thomas Millar in 2022. The software engineer launched the site after noticing that eight of the top ten links on Google were paid links. With 12ft.io, it was possible to view web pages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups, camouflaging the browser as a web crawler and thus granting access to articles without paying a subscription .

Millar had started charging a subscription fee to cover the cost of the tool. The Pro version cost $12 a month. In practice, it was better to pay the publishers. Following a report by the News/Media Alliance, the 12ft.io site was shut down by its hosting provider on July 14. The association, which considers Google AI Mode a theft , promises to take similar action against other tools that circumvent the paywall.