How Google Contributor Can Save Us From Ads — And The Web from Ad Blockers

Have you heard of Google Contributor? Nobody I’ve asked (who doesn’t work for Google) has, even though it’s been around for a year. Online reviews have been lukewarm. Google isn’t even promoting it much.

But Contributor is a much bigger deal than the collective indifference would indicate. Here’s why it deserves a second look.

What is Google Contributor?

Contributor is a way for you to pay to see fewer ads on the websites you visit. You pay a certain amount of money per month, $2, $5, or $10. As you browse the web, in the spots where you’d normally see an ad, you sometimes see a replacement image or a thank you message. The more you contribute each month, the fewer ads you see.

I know what you’re thinking...

Why would I
pay Google to block
some of the ads on a
free website? 

This is the part where most people get hung up. If blocking ads is the goal, then why is Contributor better than an ad-blocker that I could install for free that would block all ads?

Good question.

The answer: Using Contributor has some immediate benefit. But if lots of people use it, we could change the Internet.

Picture how the ad ecosystem works now. There are three main kinds of participants. There are the publishers, who put information on the web. There are the users (i.e. you) who visit the publishers’ websites, and then there are the advertisers who are willing to pay the publishers for the opportunity to get their ads in front of the users.

The result is a system where all three parties are providing value and getting benefit from the arrangement. The users enjoy the free content on the site. The advertisers get their ads before the audiences that is most likely to be interested in them, which hopefully helps them increase their sales. The publisher gets the revenue from the advertisers to pay to run the site.

Notice that in this arrangement, because the users get the web content for free, they don’t have a direct way to financially benefit the publisher. Rather, they indirectly help the publisher by visiting frequently, viewing the ads, clicking on them and patronizing the site’s advertisers.

Google’s various ad services act like a clearinghouse facilitating the transaction between the advertisers and the publishers to show ads to the users. In particular, one of the systems, Ad Exchange, provides a way for publishers to auction off unused ad space in real time to the highest bidder.

Users only indirectly help the sites they visit when they view and click on the ads.

One shortcoming of this arrangement is that while bidding is competitive on some ad spaces, often it is not. The highest bid might be only a small fraction of a cent, and the ad might be of low quality — like ads for how to get rid of belly fat or pay down your credit cards quickly “with this one simple trick.”

This is where Contributor comes in.

Don’t you think you’d be willing to pay $0.00021 to not see another ad offering you a do-it-yourself solution for your low testosterone problem? In other words would you pay about $2 to avoid seeing 10,000 ads like that? That’s what Contributor does — it lets readers bid against advertisers to price them out of the market of you. If your bid is highest, then you pay what the highest-bidding advertiser was offering to pay, and you don’t have to see the ad.

Granted, not all ads are quite that cheap. The average ad costs the advertiser probably about 10x-20x that much. But that’s still less than a penny per ad.

Would be willing to pay $0.00021 to not see another ad offering you a do-it-yourself solution for your low testosterone problem?
Would you pay $2 to avoid seeing 10,000 ads like that?

Overall, for a relatively modest amount of money each month, you can improve your web experience by selectively eliminating the lowest cost ads that are likely to also be the lowest quality. The website you are browsing continues to receive roughly the same revenue as before, except now some of it is coming directly from you instead of through advertisers.

Here is where it gets interesting. What would happen if everybody started doing this?

First, a floor would be established for ad impressions. If I could pay off every ad worth less than a tenth of a penny to just go away and leave me alone, I could go for weeks on just a dollar. A floor for ad prices means that it becomes less cost effective to advertise useless junk because the costs would rise if they have to outbid the user’s price floor.

What would happen if
everybody started doing this?

Low-bidding, low-value advertisers would be the biggest losers if Contributor becomes widely-used.

Likewise, the increase in the number of bidders competing in the auctions will tend to push up the price of ads, resulting in some net benefit to the publishers. They will now be able to earn a portion of their “ad revenue” directly from the users.

Finally, this opens up a whole new avenue for publishers to support their site. What if publishers could invite users to configure their Contributor accounts to explicitly bid higher just for their site? Heavy site users might end up contributing a dollar or two each month, while light users might end up contributing only dime or two.

If a website can convince thousands of people to do this, it could amount to hundreds or thousands of dollars of additional revenue each month. It could even lead to a publisher model where user contributions comprise a larger portion of overall revenue than advertising does.

How might that change the web?

Users have not shown any indication that they are willing to pay to stop ads. See May 5, 2016 Business Insider: "Most people aren't willing to pay even $1 a year to avoid mobile ads" by Matt Rosoff.

For Google Contributor to catch on, I think the primary impetus is going to have to come from the publishers. For each user the cost is small and the benefit from fewer ads is also small, but to the publisher the little payments add up. If a publisher of even a modest site with 100,000 uniques can convince readers to (say) pony up 10 cents a month, that is $10,000 of found money. That’s an amount that will matter to many publishers, and that’s money that can be used to improve the site to provide even better value for the visitors.

The costs and benefits are small for each user, but for a publisher, a little bit from each user can quickly add up.

There are some problems with this scenario. Google Contributor currently doesn’t make it immediately easy to customize your account to direct higher contributions towards specific sites. And current players who’ve optimized their strategy to play the current game will resist changes to the system that might disrupt their business.

It’s a shame that Google Contributor is languishing in relative obscurity, getting little attention from users — and Google. I think what Google is missing from the service is an easy way to direct more revenue towards preferred websites. Publishers would then have the incentive to encourage their users to sign up for Contributor and walk them through the process of configuring it to contribute some small but meaningful amount.

If the move is big enough it could encourage publishers to make changes to their websites that increasingly favor the preferences of their users over the desires of their advertisers.

Heck — Even Angry Birds lets me choose between watching a video ad or paying 60 gems to skip it. Imagine that choice all over the internet.

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