Introducing CancelAds – the Road to a Fair Web
by
on July 09, 2009,
Today I would like to introduce you to CancelAds, my very own startup that was developed based on my idea by my partner, a German internet entrepreneur Marcus Reimold. As the name suggests, CancelAds is a tool that is intended to help web surfers avoid advertising online - and I think many of you have heard complaints about how annoying ads are getting online.
Some of you may know that AdBlock Plus is the most popular add-on for Firefox (and has been holding the top position for quite a while now) - it enjoys half a million downloads weekly. What it does is prevents Firefox from displaying ads to you when you browse various websites. But the problem with this approach is obvious: when you avoid ads in this manner, you deprive people who create the content you enjoy of the advertising revenue they expect to earn by creating content and attracting visitors.
So after yet another discussion about how unfair ad blocking is to website owners and numerous bloggers striving to make a living (or an extra income) online, I have come up with the idea for CancelAds, the service that is intended to finally eliminate the contradiction between web surfers being unhappy about ads and web publishers - with their revenue.
My idea got another confirmation of its viability when I read the results of a 2008 survey by AdAge (only available to their paying subscribers) that told that 69% of internet users are not ready to pay to view their favorite sites without ads. But that leaves us with huge 31% of internet users who are more or less willing to consider the idea of ad-free browsing for a fee. This is who CancelAds targets and I do hope that there are many people who will be willing to support their favorite websites by paying their owners directly instead of watching their ads.
From a publisher’s point of view - be it an individual blogger, a startup owner or a large media website - CancelAds works as a tool that enables them to quickly and easily implement a subscription service so that their visitors could pay for a subscription and get ad-free browsing (and some exclusive content as well if the publisher so chooses). This subscription service will enable loyal visitors to pay for ad-free browsing instead of watching ads.
CancelAds can be viewed as a combination of donations and ad blocking where bloggers and other publishers give the people who choose to make a donation something in return - ad-free browsing and exclusive content. So to online publishers CancelAds provides an opportunity not to annoy their visitors with ads and also to diversify their revenue sources - which is something many of us need given how much the online industry depends on advertising.
CancelAds is now available in public beta so if you have a website that is currently monetized with ads, you can now register for CancelAds and grab the code to integrate into your website(s) to start offering an alternative to ad-supported browsing of your web properties.
And if you are a surfer and like the idea behind CancelAds, pay attention to CancelAds logo when browsing various websites: if you see the logo and click on it, you will be taken to a subscription page where you will be able to check how the site looks without ads, decide if this is something you are willing to pay a subscription fee for and pay with your PayPal account. You can see such a button already in the right sidebar here on Profy.
CancelAds has already started to generate some coverage and received interesting reviews posing intriguing questions from awesome blogs like CenterNetworks and ReadWriteWeb so read them for more details. Happy ad-free surfing and your feedback is more than welcome!
