Premium Content Over Ads


Photo: Rohit Padmanabhan / Unsplash.com

Content, service and products are not free. There is always a way a product is monetized.

Websites are no exception.

What most of the people don’t realize is that content that they view on websites is monetized through ads that those very users block. It hurts the website economy.

In my opinion, you can blame both, users and website owners.

Users for actively, without selection, blocking ads on websites that power it to offer content for “free” and some owners who “forced” users to use adblocks in the first place by placing ads right in their faces, essentially blocking the content, but in the end, websites who do care about the user base actually got hurt in the process.

As recent statistics published by Artem Russakovskii from Android Police tell:

42.06% of Android Police readers on desktop OSes blocked ads in September 2015. That’s absurdly high. In comparison, only 0.56% did so on mobile and another 0.68% on tablets.”

It’s much harder to block ads on mobile for regular users hence the number difference. However, numbers for desktop are high nonetheless. Despite that fact, users do spend more money on microtransaction purchases, especially on mobile. I find myself buying a lot of different stuff which is priced under 1-2 euros mark on my Android Phone.

I personally wouldn’t mind paying the very same price monthly to read my favourite website + extra features for being a premium user. It helps me as a user to get content without ads, get extra features, and support the website and the website itself will start having a stable income. It will also encourage users to be more selective in their websites of choice, leaving trust and credibility as primary reasons to subscribe. Theoretically, that will also reduce the chance people going to insecure websites aiming at stealing users information.

In the meantime, I strongly encourage anyone who uses Adblock, Ublock or any other type of ad blocking software to whitelist their favourite websites to support them and try to find the time to report ads that are inappropriate or misplaced.