http://www.zdnet.com/article/sick-of-ads-now-you-can-pay-google-not-to-see-them-plus-sites-can-charge-ad-blocker-users/?loc=newsletter_featured_related_listing&ftag=TRE-03-10aaa6b&bhid=24728584684180976123116719441341
Sick of ads? Now you can pay Google not to see them, plus sites can charge
ad-blocker users
Google rolls out its wider plan to beat back the threat of ad blockers to
revenues.
By Liam Tung | June 2, 2017 -- 11:58 GMT (04:58 PDT) | Topic: Innovation
Google has relaunched a product called Google Contributor that allows people to
pay a monthly fee to avoid seeing ads and compensates sites for the resulting
lost revenue.
The Google Contributor 'ad removal pass' joins a raft of new measures Google is
rolling out to clean up online advertising and stem the threat of ad blockers
to revenues.
Google also launched Funding Choices, which will allow publishers to display a
message to visitors using an ad blocker and offer them an ad-free subscription
via Contributor.
"With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to
visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site,
or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google
Contributor," explained Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice president of Google's
ads and commerce business.
So far only 12 sites are participating in the program, including Business
Insider UK, Eurogamer, and Popular Mechanics.
Visitors load a Contributor pass with $5, and a per-page fee is deducted and
paid to the website. It's not clear how much it will cost end-users as it's up
to each publisher to set their own per-page price. Users can add or remove
participating sites from their pass. Publishers can apply to use Contributor on
their site.
Google also confirmed yesterday's report by The Wall Street Journal that it
will be rolling out an 'ad filter' feature in Chrome in early 2018, which
blocks ads that don't conform to the Coalition for Better Ads standards of
acceptability.
"We plan to have Chrome stop showing ads, including those owned or served by
Google, on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards
starting in early 2018," said Ramaswamy.
Funding Choices is rolling out to North America, the UK, Germany, Australia and
New Zealand, with more countries gaining access later this year.
Google Contributor was actually launched in 2015 with the same proposition as
today, but it was never expanded beyond the US. Google stopped billing users in
January but said an improved version would return in early 2017.
The effort to neutralize ad blockers comes as ad-blocker usage continues to
rise. As of December, 615 million, or around 11 percent of internet users, were
running an ad blocker. Google's survey of 1,000 people in the US and Europe
found that 63 percent used an ad blocker because of too many ads, while 48
percent used one to block annoying ads.
The EU earlier this year announced a proposal to allow publishers to use
ad-blocker detecting technology without requesting the visitor's consent. This
position reverses the status quo.
As a privacy campaigner pointed out last year, the EU's ePrivacy Directive only
permits a publisher to run a browser script that checks for the presence of an
ad blocker if the user has consented to it.