Great for users, bad for website owners as ads are one of the ways that they make money. Well what if you could subscribe to websites and view them without ads? While subscription-based websites are around, Google wants to apply it across all websites via a “Contributor” system. Through this system, it seems that users can donate anywhere between $1-3 a month and view partner websites without any ads at all.
It’s an interesting move by Google especially since Google relies a lot on online advertisements as a form of revenue as well, but presumably the amount of money they could potentially make via contributions could amount to more, although it is not clear as to how much of a cut Google could be getting out of these donations.
So far a handful of websites have agreed to take part in this experiment and it includes Urban Dictionary, The Onion, Science Daily, WikiHow, Mashable, and Imgur. For those who are interested in taking Google Contributor for a spin, head on over to its website and sign up to get put on its waiting list.