Know how to read paywalled articles for free with 12ft Ladder – A web service that helps you remove paywalls from web pages without paying.
Since ad income alone isn’t viable anymore, a lot of websites, especially the news ones now hide their content behind paywalls.
Readers need to pay a one-time or a monthly fee to access the content. If you can afford it, you absolutely should pay to read such articles.
However, there are times when you are in a rush or just need to skim an interesting article but can’t because of the paywall. On the other hand, we also believe that we should be able to search on Google and get answers to our questions without paying money.
And this is where the 12ft Ladder comes to the rescue.
What is 12ft Ladder?
12ft Ladder is a web service that helps you remove paywalls from web pages without paying. It’s like a ladder that you can place on the paywall and climb over it to see what’s on the other side.
The idea behind the 12ft Ladder is actually quite simple. Just like any other website, websites with paywalls also want Google and other search engines to index their content to show up on search result pages.
To achieve this, paywalled websites don’t show a paywall to the Google crawlers. Once the crawler crawls the webpage, it will cache a copy of the site that 12ft Ladder can benefit from.
Therefore, instead of showing the live webpage, 12ft Ladder will access and show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page. It’s a pretty smart move. Isn’t it?
How To Use 12ft Ladder To Remove Paywalls?
Using 12ft Ladder to remove paywalls from web pages is pretty straightforward. You just need to add 12ft.io/ before the URL of any paywalled web page.
For example, if the URL of a paywalled web page is news.com/article, then you need to prepend 12ft.io/ to remove the paywall. So the URL of the unpaywalled version will be 12ft.io/news.com/article.
you can also visit 12ft.io and copy-paste any paywalled web page URL in the Remove Paywall URL input box. People who use mobile devices to read articles can install the 12ft shortcut on their iOS devices to hop the paywalls.
Please keep in mind that the 12ft Ladder may not be able to bypass all the paywalled web pages but is still worth a try. However, we’d always encourage you to pay whenever and wherever possible.