December 21st, 2009
Today the news discussed on TechCrunch is the planned shutdown of the only CancelAds competitor I am personally aware of - Contenture. The service was launched mere weeks prior to us launching CancelAds and was based on a different model so there was no real competition here but still we worked in the same field: providing monetization options to web publishers - startups, media websites and bloggers alike - in addition to traditional advertising.
Contenture approach was very different from CancelAds: they suggested web users to pay a monthly subscription fee that was intended to be distributed among all the publishers that had their websites visited by this or that user during the month the user paid for. Where CancelAds offers publishers to use our service as tool to arrange for an individual subscription options where the publisher determines the price, they suggested all the websites participating to share revenue based on how frequently the subscribers visit their websites.
As the guys from Contenture now claim as the reason for them to shut the service down, they have not managed to attract bigger publishers - and this was the key to success as only small websites participating did not appeal enough to those paying subscribers that provided money to make the service appealing to the publishers. It obviously sounds like an endless circle.
Now we see the result and it is no wonder that some people will be thinking that no new monetization approaches will really work and ads will always be here as the only support for content-oriented websites that are unable to charge for any premium services provided to their users. But as the team behind CancelAds, we are certainly not willing to agree here.
It is obvious that efforts involved in encouraging people to pay for something that they have always been getting for free are immense but it does not mean that it is totally impossible. My point here is that people should have options available - ad-supported but free or subscription-based.
CancelAds direct subscription service is now the only tool intended to let people pay for ad-free content but I am quite certain that since web publishers are looking for monetization options in addition to advertising only, they will eventually explain their visitors that they need this extra subscription-based support - and will provide various benefits in exchange for the money their subscribers will be paying. So I definitely believe that while Contenture has not worked, other approaches (including the one offered by CancelAds) are very much possible and we should definitely not send the entire “cancel ads for money” approach to the deadpool as well.
Tags: ad-free content, cancelads, competition, contenture, monetization
Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »
August 18th, 2009
Since CancelAds launched, we have received a bunch of questions from our early users asking us numerous things about integration of CancelAds into their websites and about the overall operation of the project. But the most popular category of questions is actually money which is quite understandable given that CancelAds is all about helping our users make extra money off their blogs and websites. So I wanted to address some of the issues I have been asked about here.
There are numerous people asking questions about how (and if) CancelAds will work in their countries so I think we should clarify it a little more. Currently the only form of payment CancelAds supports both for subscribers and for the publishers is PayPal which means that all the country-related issues should be considered from the perspective of how PayPal works for you in your country and for your subscribers in their countries.
So if you are a CancelAds publisher, you should think about two things: how your subscribers will pay you for their CancelAds subscriptions and how we will pay you your revenue out. Here you should obviously consider geography both for yourself and for your subscribers.
It is well known that PayPal divides the 190 countries that the service operates with into several categories: countries where users can both send, receive and withdraw money (with different withdrawal options available) and the countries where users can only send money but cannot receive anything to their accounts.
This means that just about anyone in the world with a PayPal account can pay for a CancelAds subscription. Unfortunately there is a problem for the subscribers in the countries where it is impossible to receive money because if such subscribers ever decide to discontinue their subscriptions and ask for a refund, we won’t be able to pay them back. But this limitation is not something we can do anything about so we’ll have to live with it for a while.
From a publisher’s point of view, even if your subscribers are able to pay you, you should remember that your own PayPal account should be able to receive funds from us so that we could send you your money once your account balance reaches the $50 minimum payout amount. This is what we encourage you to consider when integrating CancelAds into your website.
Of course we understand all the limitations of PayPal and we don’t want our publishers and their subscribers to be affected by these limitations so we will be sure to add other forms of payment in the future and support of micropayments via credit cards is one of our major priorities so some of the limitations will be removed in the near future.
And if you have any particular question (money-related or not), never hesitate to contact us here with your question(s) regarding any problem or concern that you have and we will be happy to help you!
Tags: geography, paypal
Posted in Q&A | No Comments »
July 16th, 2009
After CancelAds launched last week, some people have already arrived to the service to register their websites and begin using CancelAds as an additional monetization tool. So I wanted to thank everyone who has already submitted their websites and is considering integrating CancelAds code to their websites and blogs. I do hope the number of such websites will be growing and web surfers will have a selection of good things to subscribe to using CancelAds and enjoy them ad-free for the duration of such a subscription.
What I can now say is that the vast majority of people who have submitted their websites are bloggers and most frequently individual bloggers at that. But I am also pleased to see one web service that has already integrated CancelAds code: you can see the CancelAds button already on Mloovi Twitter Translator, a service that lets you translate your tweets to 41 languages using Google Translate.
There are also websites in Chinese, Spanish and even Arabic so while I can like the layout of the websites, I certainly cannot judge their content and explain what the sites are about. Also we have numerous websites that have been registered but the code has not been integrated yet which makes me think that some of the publishers may be experiencing problems with the code integration so I want to invite everyone facing any major or minor problem to contact us here and we will be happy to help you get up and running with CancelAds.
Also as any new service CancelAds could not avoid numerous testers who are only here to experiment and see if there are certain holes in the system. This is why we now have sites like Google Mail in the system linking to legitimate URLs that I don’t think actually belong to the people behind our user account. And while of course I’d be more than happy to have a giant like Google using our very small and young service, we do have protection against any such jokes: no matter what website you submit to CancelAds, for it to actually work you will have to integrate the code into the website template. So unless you actually have access to Gmail source code, it won’t do you any good submitting it anyway. And when the legitimate owner arrives to CancelAds with the intention to integrate the code, they will still be able to register the site again and grab their code.
So if you have a website of your own (or multiple websites), you are totally welcome to participate in CancelAds with your online properties to see how your loyal visitors will transform into your real paying customers.
Tags: integrating code, Our publishers, submitting sites
Posted in Our publishers | 3 Comments »
July 9th, 2009
So CancelAds launched a day ago and is already generating some buzz. I wanted to thank everyone who has been talking about CancelAds over these hours, in particular the awesome bloggers who have chosen to cover our launch on their blogs:
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks has published a great review of CancelAds and his readers are now engaged in a very interesting conversation in the comments section.
Jolie O’Dell of ReadWriteWeb has published a very interesting review of CancelAds discussing our target audience and chances of people actually subscribing and paying for ad-free browsing.
Steven Finch of Crenk asks an interesting question whether CancelAds is actually generating a new revenue stream for bloggers or simply redistributing the money that are already in the advertising industry. My own answer is that we are offering a way to attract money directly from readers and users, not from advertisers as it currently is but this is definitely a question worth answering anyway.
KillerStartups is also positive but they ask questions as well like where CancelAds will be growing and expanding. For now let me just tell you that we have more plans than we can possibly develop right away for our beta launch as the road map is huge and during the first day people have already suggested many new features that have now been added to the road map as well.
And it is really a pleasure to hear numerous comments from people on Twitter (follow CancelAds on Twitter) and FriendFeed (CancelAds on FriendFeed), especially since many people think that the idea behind CancelAds is very interesting and promising. But of course the real pleasure is our very first publishers - I will share some names in a subsequent post over the next few days. Please, do not hesitate to share your own opinion on CancelAds in any manner you choose - on your blog, on Twitter, on FriendFeed or anywhere else, we are definitely listening!
Tags: CancelAds news, Press about us, road map
Posted in Press about us | 1 Comment »
July 8th, 2009
Today marks the first day of CancelAds, the service that is intended to solve the usual contradiction between web publishers who don’t know how to monetize their content without ads and web surfers who hate ads online and think they are irritating and intrusive.
The idea for CancelAds was born after a blog post I wrote about how unfair it is that people surf websites and blogs with various ad blocking plugins enabled in their browsers - thus not letting website owners who work hard to create the content such surfers enjoy earn some advertising revenue off this content.
One of the commentators admitted that he thoroughly enjoyed my blog but did not want to watch ads anyway. And he mentioned that if there was a solution for him to pay me directly instead of watching ads and paying with his eyeballs, he would have been happy to use such a solution.
That comment made me realize that there was really no tool to make this possible - so I thought the web industry needed CancelAds. Then it took me some time to find a partner - a German entrepreneur Marcus Reimold - who developed the entire project. But finally here we are with the idea coming true and launched publicly.
CancelAds works as a tool that enables web publishers to stop displaying ads to those visitors and users who choose to pay some small amounts for subscriptions. The publishers choose how much they think their content should be paid for and they can also offer some additional exclusive pieces of content to their CancelAds subscribers only.
Today CancelAds is launched in public beta and registration of websites is now open so if you are willing to see how it will work with the audience of your website, head over to CancelAds and submit your website (or as many websites as you want to) and let’s hope your loyal readers/visitors/users will transform into your paying subscribers.
And next time that you see CancelAds logo on one of your favorite websites, keep in mind that this means you can buy an ad-free subscription to that site and enjoy the site without ads throughout the duration of your subscription. Happy ad-free surfing!
Tags: announcements, cancelads, cancelads idea, CancelAds news, launch day
Posted in CancelAds news | No Comments »
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