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CoinTent — Sustainable ad-free web
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Mike Garrett
This seems like a hard sell with services like Google Contributor https://www.google.com/contribut... already in existence. What's the advantage of using CoinTent?
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@mikengarrett Hi Mike. We were definitely pretty surprised when Google announced Contributor, but now we feel it serves as another point of validation to us that there is a need for CoinTent :)
There are two main advantages we have over Google Contributor: we remove ads on every site, and we remove all (99% of) ads on that site.
Google Contributor is a really cool concept, but the way it was structured it's essentially a biz dev constraint (which even for google has been a problem) - it is really only valuable if enough of the sites you go to are on it, and even then it won't be all sites you visit or every ad on that site. CoinTent on the other hand removes almost every ad on every site you visit, which provides much higher value to the end consumer.
Thanks for hunting us, Dalton!
I'm Brad Ross, one of the founders of CoinTent. We started this company a few years ago because of a horrible experience I had on a magazine website trying to read a story. Pop-up ads, slide down ads, ads around the page, video auto-play ads, text ads in the article. It was crazy... and as I'm sure you all know way too common today. We've been working with websites and publishers to help them find alternative ways to generate revenue (that don't involve creating horrible user experiences!) and found that ad blockers were a huge issue for them. 20% of US users on average blocking ads and not supporting sites at all!
With CoinTent, we created a solution that helps both consumers and websites have a sustainable model. It blocks ads across every site you go to, and is a $5/mo subscription that we pay out across the sites you spend the most time with.
We're excited to help create a more sustainable web, and just launched on Kickstarter to build our base of users and have an initial pool of money to support sites with. We'd love for you to ask any questions you have, upvote us, or back us on Kickstarter!
Thanks everyone!
One of the common questions (especially in the tech community) we get is why would people pay if they could block ads for free. While many non-techy users are not familiar with ad blockers and may simply pay for an ad-free web, we see three main reasons:
1) Ad blocking companies without a sustainable model sell your data to make money, sell ads themselves (seriously... the biggest ad blocker just launched an ad network! http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/1...), and extort websites requiring them to pay up for their ads to be shown.
2) Sites are increasingly having to build pop-ups and paywalls that prevent ad-blocking users from viewing their content unless they support the site.
3) People want to support their favorite sites
@bradcoin Brad this is actually what I was envisioning....We should talk more and partner up Brad.
I run an ad blocker with over 100,000 users...we're growing exponential, and I want to really spark the conversation on what happens next not simply to offer a utility that disconnects the customers from those creating the content.
We had 5,000 downloads yesterday...
@nicholassheriff Hey Nicholas - glad to hear you think this is the right direction for the web and ad-blockers to go! Happy to connect, I'll DM you on Twitter.
Really excited about what this could mean for content on the web. Going to back the Kickstarter now!!
Five years ago, I used to be editor-in-chief and publisher of media for DevOps/hackers/developers and - no surprise - almost 40% of all the readers were using AdBlock. We detected those and asked to whitelist the site. ~10% of them did! I am glad that my YC fellows came to this ad-free model which benefits both readers and publishers. As a former publisher and active reader now, I'm happy to support CoinTent at KickStarter. Good luck mates!
@happydannoday Hah. We almost went with 'ad-blocking sunglasses' as swag... maybe we should have :)
Literally there is not a better team to deliver on this, this is the model that makes sense for the future.