CancelAds Archive

Back in the late ’90s, one of the sites I read regularly decided to offer a “no-ads” subscription for $80/year. They claimed that they had thousands of subscribers over the life of the program. To make it work, they added more ads which helped to increase subscriptions.

Today, Svetlana Gladkova (she is editor of the Profy blog) is launching a similar program to support bloggers and remove ads at the same time. CancelAds hopes to offer readers a quick and easy option to remove the ads on a blog or website for a specific period of time. I think of it as the next level of “tipping”.

From the release, “CancelAds is based on the idea that all the online publishers are compensated for their content by their visitors and users: some pay for premium services while other visitors watch ads. The much-criticized trend is that the vast majority of web publishers rely on advertising as their only source of revenue. This is exactly where CancelAds offers a solution as the startup is intended to ensure the badly needed diversification of revenue sources.”

CancelAds provides bloggers with a line of code to add to their template and buttons to allow readers to purchase blocks of time that the ads will be “cancelled”. Payment is made via PayPal and after the payment is made, readers surf ad-free for the purchased time period.

Naturally not every reader is going to use CancelAds, in fact my guess is that the percentage will be relatively low. But it’s an additional option and the service costs nothing to install. Bloggers and CancelAds share in the revenue generated from each purchase. There are a variety of content topics where I think CancelAds could work (early adopter blogging isn’t one of them) and overall I like the idea of a potential additional direct revenue stream for blogs. I’ve been a fan of blog revenue models that layer instead of replace.
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