Adblock Plus and (a little) more
Flattr Plus · 2016-05-03 15:32 by Ben Williams
Today we’re pleased to announce Flattr Plus, a new product that will allow you to easily and automatically fund the artists, bloggers and musicians you love. Flattr Plus is a joint project with Flattr and it will revolutionize web monetization.
You can sign up for the Flattr Plus beta today at flattrplus.com. You’ll be able to start testing that at end of the month, and we will launch the complete version at year’s end.
As we’ve written many times before, Acceptable Ads was a conscious pivot away from blocking all the things toward finding a way to block only the annoying things, so publishers can monetize on users’ terms. That was 2011. Since then we’ve been trying to figure out an ad-less way for users to fund content, because, well, we felt like it was the right thing to do.
The pioneers of the world wide web envisioned it as a public service, and it existed as such for a couple of years. Then came the ads, and with them the false notion that journalism and other content on this very public medium must be reliant on ads. Really, though, it never had to be that way … but try telling that to an advertiser.
Even after all these years, the web’s primary purpose is still to share information. It just got a little hung up on one type of information: ads. Look, we don’t want to break up, Ads. There’s still plenty of space for you here … we just want to see other people. Are you cool with that?
So today, in 2016, we’ve found a solution with our friends from Flattr that makes funding content simple.
Here’s how it works:
You decide how much you want to commit to the web ecosystem, and the Flattr Plus algorithm automatically apportions that to the websites you engaged with the most. That’s it! You don’t have to push any buttons, enter any bank info, decide to fund this article and not that one – nothing. You just surf like normal.
On the website/publisher side it’s just as easy. To receive payments you literally need to take five minutes to sign up. There are no tags or logos placed on your website – you just start getting free money.
It’s not our style to be bashful, so how bout this: our goal for next year is to raise a half billion dollars for publishers.
Help us get there by helping us get over our ads obsession.
Comment [6]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Claire · 2016-05-03 16:43 · #
you guys are heroes. revolutionizing the web for real.
Reply from Ben Williams:
Maybe not quite on the heroes level, but thanks!
Alexander Schmidt · 2016-05-03 19:03 · #
The time has come to find a solution for funding journalistic websites or blogs with time-consuming content to create.
So this idea is not entirely new, but really appealing to me and I just signed-up for “Flattr Plus”, to see how it works.
Reply from Ben Williams:
Thanks for signing up, looking forward to your feedback. I think what makes this new is that it’s automatic and frictionless.
Price · 2016-05-04 07:04 · #
Nice way to drive up the price of ads and get people to pay to see less ads
Reply from Ben Williams:
Not sure I follow. What do you mean?
Robert Walls · 2016-05-06 17:07 · #
How compensation work if the site the user wants to support is not signed-up for Flattr Plus?
Reply from Ben Williams:
We would go to the site and tell them people want to give them money :) But until they sign up, the user would just get their money back.
BadServo · 2016-05-06 22:07 · #
I’m interested in the program, as I already use Google’s Contributer program, but after reading several posts about Flattr Plus, I can only find information about how money is given to participating sites, and nothing about how the experience works from the end-user standpoint. Does it function like normal with ABP removing adds and allocating funds to those sites? are adds simply reduced? Must participating sites be whitelisted for the funding calculations to function? Are non-participating sites still having ads removed as before? Any additional info is appreciated, sir.
Reply from Ben Williams:
Howdy,
There are a lot of details to work out in the beta, so I’d urge you to sign up at flattrplus.com. However, I can already say that the end-user experience will be seemless: you just assign an amount per month you’d like to spend, and it takes care of the rest. To your specific questions …
Does it function like normal with <span class=“caps”>ABP</span> removing adds and allocating funds to those sites?
Nope. You can use ABP and Flattr Plus or either separately.
Must participating sites be whitelisted for the funding calculations to function?
No, whitelisting doesn’t play any role.
Are non-participating sites still having ads removed as before?
Yes — again, although this will likely be part of Adblock Plus, the two can and function separately.
treos · 2016-05-29 19:57 · #
huh…i wonder what all those nay sayers who say things like “adblockers will kill the internet” or similar have to say about this.
Reply from Ben Williams:
I think they’re secretly ABP users ;)