SAN FRANCISCO: Google on last Thursday, announced a service by which people who visits favorite websites frequently can be rewarded with ad-free pages. A "Google Contributor" experiment was introduced with a handful of partners including tech news website Mashable and The Onion, which is known for clever satires. Google described the effort as an "experiment in additional ways to fund the web." "When you visit a participating website, part of your contribution goes to the creators of that site," Google said at a page launched for those interested in taking part. "As a reminder of your support, you'll see a thank you message - often accompanied by a pixel pattern - where you might normally see an ad." Contributors are asked to set a monthly donation amount ranging from US$1 to US$3, and in exchange wipe out the ads that some surfers see as a nuisance. Donated money is doled out based on which websites contributors visit, with Google keeping an unspecified portion.
What is the motive behind?
People who don’t want to see ads on their favourite sites but are willing to pay a small monthly fee to help support the sites can sign up with Google’s Contributor service. When a reader visits a participating site that uses Google’s advertising services to make money from viewers of the site, Contributor pays the site a small sum from the small monthly fee instead of money for advertising views. It means that users only support sites that they visit regularly.
What about the ads?
The ads are replaced with a small message thanking them for being a contributor. The space where the advert would have been is filled with a pixellated pattern, instead of being removed entirely, apart from on mobile devices where the publisher can choose to have them removed.
Price
Google lets users choose how much they want to pay to not see ads from $1, $2 or $3 (£1.91) a month tied to a Google account. Google has not given details on how much money it will make, or how much publishers’ sites, will make compared to revenues from display ads, though its promotional material for Contributor states: “When visiting a participating website, part of your contribution goes to the creators of that site.”
Test and Trial
Google is starting the service with 10 publishing partners, including Mashable, Imgur, WikiHow and Science Daily. Sites outside of the trial will still show adverts as normal, even if they use Google’s advertising platform. The service will expand to include more sites as more publishers sign up, but is only working with sites and publishers based in the US for the time being.
How can you sign up?
Initially access to Contributor is via invitation only, similar to the launch of many of Google’s other services including Gmail and the new Inbox app. Users can sign up for a waiting list to be invited. Once invited users can see which sites are participating in the scheme and choose whether to join or not. Everything is handled through a Google account, which means the user has to be logged into that Google account while browsing to trigger the Contributor system rather than adverts on participating sites.
Some Alternatives?
Some publishers, including the Next Web, have already experimented with reader-supported subscriptions that remove ads from their site. A yearly subscription to the Next Web, which removes ads and gives access to a full RSS feed, costs $36.30. A service called Readability tried something similar to Google’s Contributor, allowing users to pay a small monthly sum that was then distributed to participating sites when a user visited them. The service shut down in 2012. Some sites, including the Guardian, allow users to pay to remove adverts in their smartphone and tablet apps, but not for their freely available web versions.
Future Forecasting for making money online:
Many different funding mechanisms have been tried over the years to pay for web content. Paywalls such as those used by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the Times are the latest experiment at making money from readers without relying solely on advertising. Those sites still show advertising, however. Google’s experiment could prove whether readers of sites are actually willing to pay for the content they enjoy on a cross-site basis, and Google has the advantage of being able to remove the adverts when people do.
No comments:
Post a Comment