Google Contributor

» see contributor.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Contributor launched invite-only and american, which settled the question of whether i was going to be trying it. That is worth saying plainly, because the interesting thing about this product is not the experience of using it. It is that google, of all companies, spent five years running an experiment to find out whether people would pay cash to not be advertised to, and then published the answer.

It went live on 20 november 2014. You gave google two or three dollars a month. When you then visited a site in its ad network, the slots that would have carried ads were filled instead with a flat pattern of colored pixels, and a message telling you that your money had gone to that publisher. Your contribution was bidding in the ad auction on your own behalf, and winning, and then showing you nothing.

The mechanic was honest in a way almost nothing in advertising is. It made the price of your attention visible. A month of not seeing ads across your normal reading cost a couple of dollars, which meant that a month of seeing them had been worth about that much to somebody, and now you knew the number.

I read about it at the time and could not have signed up if i had wanted to. What stayed with me was the strangeness of the pixel pattern. Not a blank space where the page simply reflowed, but a deliberate rectangle in the exact shape of the ad, sitting there to remind you that you had paid for the silence.

~ the record ~

~ the two versions ~

By late 2016 the price had climbed to somewhere between $6.99 and $14.99 a month, which is a lot to pay for the absence of banners. On 17 december 2016 google announced the program would end in its current form, and on 17 january 2017 it did, with remaining balances refunded and the landing page promising a new and improved Contributor in early 2017.

That one turned up in june 2017 and was a different animal. Instead of a blanket subscription it sold passes, and it leaned on Funding Choices, the tooling google was building for publishers who wanted to confront ad-block users with a choice. The reader-facing idealism of version one had turned into a lever in a fight between publishers and ad blockers, which is a fair description of what happened to the whole idea of paying for the web between 2014 and 2017.

~ what it became ~

Google closed Contributor on 23 april 2020 and did not try a third time. The concept did not die with it, since the shape survives anywhere you pay a site directly to turn the advertising off, but the specific version google built is gone, and it is the version that mattered because google could actually see both sides of the auction.

The result of the experiment is the part worth keeping. Google owned the ad network and had hundreds of millions of logged-in users already paying it for other things, which is as good a position as anyone will ever have for selling ad-free browsing directly to readers. It ran the test twice, for five years, and the number of people willing to pay was never large enough to matter. Ad blockers meanwhile did the same job badly, for free, and won.

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