The world's biggest online advertising platform, Google, is experimenting with a new feature that lets consumers pay to make its ads on other websites disappear.
Part crowd-funding, part ad-block, Google Contributor invites people to nominate a monthly subscription fee of between $US1 and $US3 to remove Google Ads from participating websites, with "part" of your payment going directly to publishers when you visit their sites. Ads are replaced with a thank-you message.
Andrea Faville, a spokeswoman for the California-based tech giant, said 10 sites were testing the service, including Mashable, The Onion, WikiHow, imgur, Urban Dictionary and Science Daily.
The trial is in the US only and, like many of Google's new undertakings, Contributor is invitation only for now.
Google has experimented with similar methods in recent months. In June it announced Fan Funding for YouTube, which lets viewers make donations up to $US500 to the video channels they enjoy the most. Currently in beta, channels must enable the service first, and fans need a Google Wallet account in order to make a donation. It's only available to Australian, US, Mexican and Japanese residents.
Google would not comment on what percentage of Contributor payments publishers would receive. However, it skims 23 cents, plus 5 per cent, off YouTube Fan Funding donations.
The "experiment in additional ways to fund the web", as Google explains it, has led some to ponder whether it could spell an end to paywalls.
Australian venture Nanotransactions is already making headway with an alternative revenue model of its own.
Unlike Google Contributor, the micro-payments system only asks users to pay a few cents for each article they read, which is deducted from an e-wallet. When they hit their nominated cap, they are simply reminded to top up their account.
Still in development by digital agency Sakura Sky, chief technology officer Andrew Stevens told Fairfax Media that Nanotransactions was set for an early 2015 launch, with one Australian publisher already signed up and several more in the pipeline.
Sakura Sky also developed the iPad app for Fairfax Media (publisher of this site) mastheads.
Ironically, an initial crowdfunding campaign for Nanotransactions via IndieGoGo only raised $US3277 of its $85,000 target - just 4 per cent.
But Mr Stevens does not consider the campaign a failure by any means, with publicity from the campaign sparking plenty of interest from media outlets.
"We're on loads of people's radars," Mr Stevens said. "The good thing about Australian publishing is that everyone knows everyone."
He said people's reading habits were changing as they increasingly grazed on a wide range of publications via social channels.
"My daily reading involves not going to any one site but going on Reddit and seeing what people have posted," he said.
"I could go through 40 in a row and [I'll] be on 40 different sites. Sometimes you don't even know which site you're on."
It did not make sense to make readers pay for a year's subscription just to access a few articles here and there, he said.
Mr Stevens said while big players like Google were looking to make a buck through shaking up the online publishing market, Nanotransactions was designed for publishers "above all", and was completely independent and not beholden to shareholders.
Peter Fray, deputy editor at The Australian, is toying with another revenue model.
Called Milk Pilot, it is looking at using social media to distribute revenue to journalists according to how they rank each other's work.
With Bloomberg
