Archive for July, 2009

Welcome to the First CancelAds Publishers

Thursday, 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.

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Posted in Our publishers | 3 Comments »

CancelAds Generating Some Buzz

Thursday, 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!

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Posted in Press about us | 1 Comment »

Welcome To CancelAds!

Wednesday, 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!

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Posted in CancelAds news | No Comments »