Google has a long back-and-forth history with ad blocking. In 2013 it banned Adblock Plus from its mobile Play Store, which many advertisers saw as a good thing; but it left Adblock on the shelves for the desktop edition of Chrome, and just a few months later, it was reported Google was paying Adblock Plus fees to have its ads exempted from blocking.
Now Google has made the surprising move of taking ad blocking into its own hands by offering the service directly to consumers on both web and mobile browsers – for a fee.
The service, which Google says is “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web,” is called Google Contributor. Users that pay for it will have limited ad-free access to contributing publishers’ sites.
The service launched Nov. 19 with 10 publishers on board, including Imgur, Mashable, The Onion, Science Daily and Urban Dictionary.
For access to the sites, users may choose to contribute $1 to $3 per month. According to Digiday, that amount establishes a bank account for the user that they pay out of each time they would have been shown an ad.
As usual, the ad is put up for auction on Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, but the user’s bank account will match any winning bid price that an advertiser pays. The user is essentially outbidding every advertiser for their own ad impressions, and the publisher makes exactly what they would have had the ad been shown. The advertiser doesn’t pay for an ad that was blocked, since only auction winners have to pay.
Google, for its part, doesn’t care whether the user or the advertiser pays the publisher – the DoubleClick exchange gets the same cut regardless.
It remains to be seen whether Google Contributor will catch on as most publishers are aware, online monthly subscriptions have had mixed reviews, and micropayments have a tortured history.
But if a very limited pool of consumers do adopt Contributor, that could end up being a good thing for advertisers by preventing them from wasting spend on particularly ad-averse audiences.
Clarification: Google Contributor is currently only available in the U.S.
