Google Contributor ad passes

[darkoshi]

I recently came across this message on the accuweather website:

Please allow ads to display for AccuWeather.com, and help us keep our weather news free.
- Allow ads on AccuWeather.com
- Buy an ad removal pass

The ad removal pass is managed by Google Contributor. The main URL redirects to "https://contributor.google.com/v/beta", which indicates it is still in beta mode, even though the current version has been available since June 2017.

From the website:

Each time you visit a page without ads, a per-page fee is deducted from your pass to pay the creators of the website, after a small portion is kept by Google to cover the cost of running the service. The price per page is set by the creator of the site. [Currently one cent per page, for the accuweather site.]

When you visit a site that you have added to your Contributor pass all of the ads will be removed.
It even plays nicely with other browser extensions.

You load your pass with $5. When your balance drops below $1 it will top-up by $5 automatically.

How Contributor works

After you add a website to your Contributor pass, ads are removed whenever you access that site while signed in to your Google account from your browsers and devices.

You can apply your ad removal pass to additional participating sites at any time.

Sites that use Contributor - not very many, so far.

I like the idea of being able to support sites in an easy per-page manner like that, even if I don't visit them very often. But I don't like that it would require staying logged into a Google account.

Comments

[randomdreams]

Huh. I think I like that as a micropayment system. It would be nice to have some way of knowing how much each site cost.

[darkoshi]

If you find and click an ad-pass link from the banner shown on one of the individual sites, that will say how much that site charges per page. But yeah, it would be nice if you could easily find that on the Google Contributor site too.

Oh, I found it: From this list, click the "Add to your pass" link for any site, and then on the next page, scroll down a little and under "How it works", it shows how much that site charges per page.

It also said that when you're signed up for it, you can check your account to see how much has been paid for each site.

Maybe that list isn't up to date. It doesn't include Popular Mechanics, which is one of the only two listed on the main page - I was wondering why only 2 are listed there.

Unsuccessfully tried to find an ad-pass link from the Popular Mechanics site. If a site is going to implement infinite scrolling, they shouldn't put informational stuff at the bottom of the page, where you can never reach it.

[marahmarie]

You can just X out of the interstitial (just did it, myself). There are also JS toggles that can turn that kind of stuff off (which don't work for me more than say, 80-90% of the time, but that's better than nothing; just tried mine on AccuWeather and it completely destroyed the whole page so bad it was almost fun to watch).

[darkoshi]

I noticed that. Even in cases where a banner can't be dismissed, often you get can rid of it by disabling 1st-party JS (I have 3rd-party JS disabled by default anyway, with exceptions set for sites I use a lot).

Thing is, I like the idea of buying an ad-pass or something similar that would work for multiple sites, not to get rid of ads (because I already have them blocked), but to support websites that I use regularly. It seems a fair exchange, as I *am* blocking ads that would otherwise give them revenue. But that particular site is not one I use regularly, and this ad-pass implementation requires being logged into Google, which makes it problematic for me.