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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.