- 5-50% fewer ads isn't good enough, it needs to remove all ads.
- It's too expensive. There is no way my ad impressions add up to $10 a month.
- How is the money divided? How big is Google's cut? Needs to be clarified, ideally made user-configurable.
I remember when Contributor was in an internal beta (back then I worked at Google). Initially there were no tiers. I recall being completely shocked at how high my 'budget' had to be to stop seeing just most ads, not even all of them. It was much, much higher than $10 per month.
When I looked at the per-site breakdown it was obvious why: I spent a lot of time on sites that advertisers were willing to pay a lot to be on, like (oddly enough) Slashdot. Presumably due to the affluent, IT-budget-controlling and very tightly defined audience. My eyeballs were literally worth a lot of money and to buy them back, would therefore cost a lot of money.
It was when I started to see those figures, and I wasn't even getting an ad free web, that I realised the whole dream of using micropayments to clear the web of advertising was a non starter. Hardly anyone is going to be willing to double or triple the price of their internet subscription just to get rid of some ads, some of the time. We really have no idea just how much the web economy relies on advertising to survive.
Presumably Contributor uses tiered budgets to avoid sticker-shock and people blowing through their budget in the first few days of the month. It makes sense but they can never get rid of all ads that way.
P.S. I don't use ad blockers.
They do though. Online advertising is a ~$60 billion a year (domestic US) business undergoing very rapid ~50%/year growth rates (estimates vary wildly).
Over around 120 million households, that's about $42 per month per household.
Over 20 million households with at least an upper-middle-class income, it's even higher.
Most people aren't willing to pay their equal share of the numbers, but most people also don't have the money to pay it now.
It would be hilarious if you took the 20% of the country with plenty of disposable income and made them the subscription base for destroying advertising: it results in ads shown only to the people without the money to justify them, or sites which go subscription-only.
And the space where those ads would have appeared, as well.
Do you believe that Google's description of the way it works is inaccurate, then?
"Instead of bidding on behalf of an advertiser, Contributor bids on your behalf, with the budget you set up. The Google ad auction determines when a thank you message will appear in an ad space, and how much it will cost. In the ad auction, advertisers and Contributor bid for a given ad space in real time." [0]
Why is Netflix, Spotify ok for $10 but not a constant stream of content from any source online? People spend 10x more on coffee every month in some areas.
This has been tried without much adoption (e.g. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/).
Really the problem is that newspapers make very little online, even with high numbers of ads, compared to print.
It isn't cost effective to run an online-only newspaper (with all of the extraneous costs that go into producing "news", and not "blogs"). Thus, they have a strong incentive to crazy subscription models instead of streamlining everything.