Im not sure how I feel about this: on the one hand many sites are going crazy with ads, OTOH Google is casting themselves, once again as gatekeeper.
Google tests scheme where you pay a monthly subscription fee and then you don't see ads on participating websites when you visit, but the website still gets crumbs from the table paid for your visit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30144073
I was just thinking about this the other day. I have a love/hate relationship with Google. Part of me would like to not have anything to do with them, but the other part things Chrome is my favorite browser, GMail by a long shot my favorite email interface, Google Sheets more useful that Excel a lot of times and so forth.
So I asked myself how I would feel if Google just decided that their primary business is SAAS not advertising. How much would I pay for Google Apps, Google Docs, Analytics, etc etc.... I wouldn't flinch at $100/year. I *would* flinch at $100/month.
But pay a monthly fee of any amount just to make a small percentage of the ads I see go away? That doesn't really change much of anything for me. It's the least of my "issues" and not something I really interested in paying for.
Screws adwords publishers.
What RC said...
And I would not pay those Fers a dime to cut my lawn !
My issue with ads is not so much the number on page but how long they take to load while the page is jumping around on my browser. I do have an issue with interstatials or whatever they are called these days, which have now replaced the popup. You just start reading a page and some damn semitransparent screen blanks out the page to sell me something.
Of course with this scheme, Google gets a cut no matter what. It's good to be the king.
>>Screws adwords publishers
Does it? It cuts them off certain sites, but only for users who want an ad-free experience. So how much are you missing out on? You could argue it would cut down on junk clicks.
> how much are you missing out on?
Enough that reddit thanks users for not using adblock. And that's adblock (marginally technically literate). The G ad-free experience would be for the unwashed masses (which seems to be where the money is). The only likely salvation, though, is the even the unwashed masses hate paying for web services.
Right, Adblock is bad for Reddit, but that's an AdSense thing, not an AdWords thing.
From the AdWords end of thing I'm only missing out on getting my ends in front of people who are willing to pay not to see ads.
As for how it works for Reddit on the AdSense end of things, it's basically converting from a PPC to a PPI model, because the sites in question are essentially being paid by impression in this scheme. So whether that works out for good or ill depends on the payouts. Could be good, could be terrible. From that perspective it becomes like a micro subscription.
For AdWords users I think it only becomes a problem if it goes to massive scale, but at a small scale it would probably depend on your niche. As with Adblock, if you're in tech niche, you might be screwed. Less so if you're selling credit fixing ;-)
I'm a little confused by what people perceive the benefit of this type of thing being? Despite taking a professional interest in how good peoples ads are I do largely have ad blindness and I'm sure that applies to a lot of people not in the business, so paying your $3 a month to see a
pixelated image rather than an ad achieves what. exactly?
It doesn't provide you with any more meaningful content to look at (arguably less) and it doesn't resolve the problem for people who are offended by the concept of advertising (because rather than paying by clicking they are now paying by not seeing - which hardly 'punishes' the publisher and also benefits the advertiser by not paying for meaningless impressions as per ergophobes point) so fundamentally you're paying to replace one thing you say is useless* with another thing which is definately useless. Why?
* I'm not sure that ad bolcking only removes people who genuinely wouldn't click anyway - I think a lot of people who say they hate ads click on them a fair bit. Arguably by removing ads from websites there will be a lot more searches, especially around gifting and other sales trending times of year (new year sales etc) as people try to get back to something they saw before and are now not seeing in retargeting ads....
>why
What we really have here is a glorified protection scheme: Google is the biggest seller of ads, ads are becoming annoying to consumers, you can pay Google to protect you from being annoyed by Google ads on participating sites.
This may be why the scheme is in BETA, somebody might catch on. :)