AdSense has a new feature and I reeeeeeeally don’t get it. This has got to be the oddest monetization model I’ve seen in a while.
Apparently Google believes some people hate ads so much, they’d actually pay AdSense Publishers monthly NOT to see them.
This new AdSense product is called Contributor.
Here’s Google’s official definition (source)…
Contributor is a new source of revenue for your sites, funded directly by your site visitors. With Contributor, users pick a monthly contribution level (either $2, $5, or $10) and those funds are used to pay for your site—instead of ads. The result is that users see fewer ads and you still get paid.
Here’s how it works: when Contributor users visit a site in Google’s network, their monthly contribution is used to bid on their behalf in the ad auction—so they end up buying the ad slot rather than a traditional advertiser. The more they contribute, the fewer ads they see, and you still get paid.
If you decide to use the Contributor feature, you’ll see a badge on your site that looks something like this…
Google explains how to add it and sync it to your account here. Here’s another splash page with more info here.
Wait… Did That Say “Monthly?”
I had to re-write parts of this post because I missed the word “monthly” when I pasted the definition above.
Seriously?
This is starting to look like some weird site subscription or a donation button on steroids.
Look, I’m all about making donations. I have donated to developers of WordPress plugins because I really do think they deserve a little something for creating great free tools.
And then there are people who have a difficult time monetizing their sites due to lack of relevant ads, lack of affiliate programs, etc. This happens a lot with entertainment related sites. Again, that’s where donation buttons are a perfect fit.
But paying a monthly fee to see less advertising seems crazy.
Why Didn’t They Mimic Patreon?
I think what bothers me the most is the spin they used. If they had likened this to Patreon where you support a site you love by giving what you can afford, then maybe I wouldn’t be so critical.
I wonder why they didn’t go with that angle? That might encourage more people to join.
Imagine a very popular blog about a TV show that struggles with monetization. If 500 fans contributed just $2 per month, that’s $1,000/month.
Many of the contributors wouldn’t even care about the fewer ads. They’d just give because they want to support the site. Fewer ads would just be an added bonus.
What About Earnings?
I didn’t see anything in the article about the revenue share.
My guess is they take the same percentage as they do for AdSense clicks and impressions. It’s not clear.
As far as how this impacts earnings, the Contributor is buying an ad slot on your site. So you are getting paid by them instead of the ads that would normally appear in that slot.
How to Disable Contributor
If you want no part of this odd feature, you can disable it.
Login to your account and click the “Allow and Block Ads” from the main menu. Now select the ‘Ad Networks’ tab. Search for ‘Contributor’, and then turn off that ad network.
Is There Really a Need For This?
If you’ve read any tips about launching a product, there’s always advice about defining a need in the market.
So how does that apply here?
When is the last time you visited a website and thought, “Gee, I’d PAY to see less advertising here! Where do I sign up?”
Probably never.
And remember, you’re only blocking ads on ONE site. What about the rest of the pages on the Internet? Is blocking SOME ads on ONE site going to be THAT valuable to people?
Plus, as Mark pointed out on Twitter, websites often use other ad networks too.
@2createawebsite also this only blocks Adsense ads so sites using other networks will still have ads.
— Mark Serrano LaFlare (@markserranopro) November 7, 2015
If ads bother you that much, you can cough up $10 bucks for ad block software. And that’s a ONE-TIME fee, by the way. Not monthly.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather support a site with a one-time donation or buy a product (if applicable). Ads don’t bother me that much! And if they happen to bother you, there are less costly ways to remedy that.
I would rather people support my site by buying a course or use an affiliate link. Not to mention, it’s cheaper in the long run!
Seriously, am I missing something here? Please tell me I am.
I swear… the more I type, the more I keep shaking my head. So I better end this post before I get dizzy. 🙂
What do you think of this?
I do also dislike and hate this adsene contributor very much.
I like Contributor and would love to see it succeed. Unfortunately I think it is too little, too late. And apparently it is a complicated thing for people to understand.
As a blogger, I don’t really care where the money comes from. I just want a little compensation for my time. … As a website visitor, I would much rather see pictures of cats than ugly ads that slow my browsing experience.
Why don’t I just use an ad blocker? Because if somebody took the time to put together content that I may find useful, the least I can do is allow them a little compensation. When logged in to my contributor account I am able to block sites that I don’t want my contributor dollars going to (including my own sites) and I can see how much of my $2 went to the sites I visited.
The place where I feel like this could hurt publishers is that you will not get per-click ad money from visitors using contributor. But you still get a little cpm, so it is better than an ad blocker.
Lisa, I used to use an extension, Ad blocker plus on Chrome. I was able to visit websites and watch Youtube videos free from ads for free.
Google allows this plugin so what is up?
That’s what some bloggers have been talking about, but I’ve also read they are trying to block those. In fact, a YouTube subby told me her adblocker on YouTube no longer works now that YouTube Red is out.
Wow, we have no idea that Google is still operating the Adsense program!
Oh thanks! I did see and read the email from Google but I had no idea this option was activated by default. I should have paid more attention I guess but I deleted the mail immediately since I was not interested by that feature.
How sneaky to hide that option in the Ad Networks instead of putting it up as a very distinct feature.
Hello Lisa,
When I got the email from Google about this “contributor” of a thing, I thought to myself (how fullish a thing this is) but I had to remain silent not until you say something about it because I was scared not to get my adsense account banned lol.
They should instead work on their ads that are being blocked by ad blockers.
Namaste,
Edos Ubebe
Who needs Adsense, this is the age of adblocks, browsers blocking ads by deafualt, and services like Googleweblight. No surprises here, google had to do something to protect its revenue.
Thx for this article Lisa, I’m always indebted to you with up-to-date info. I decide to disable mine, I thought it was a load of tosh, but time will tell.
Hey Sharon! Thanks for coming by. Yes I agree… a load of tosh! lol
Is Google contributor enabled by default?
Yes it is.
Wow Lisa!
I hope Google has their “steal toed boots” on.
This really seems like they are “shooting themselves in the foot”.
Amazingly, I first started following you after discovering your “I make $$$ a month using AdSense” video, on YouTube. Sorry, I don’t remember the exact wording, it was a while ago.
To think that years later, you would publish a post that is so critical of AdSense and Google’s marketing ideas is just astonishing!
It’s so wonderful, every time you show your support for us!
My take:
What a shame it is that things like “Add Blockers” even have to exist at all.
As a blog owner, I have no problem with someone trying to earn a buck by displaying ads, so long as they are not Hard Selling.
When I land on a site doing a Hard Sell and bombarding me with ads, its GOOD BYE FOREVER.
Quality Content, Quality products & services, and being trustworthy is not a “game”.
If Google isn’t careful, Social Media and the Blogosphere will overtake them, just from the power of earning people’s trust, providing consistent quality, and engagement.
I recently retired, and started learning with the Blogging 101 class at Blogging University.
My blog is getting more recognition. I’m learning how to better engage. Improvements are slowly being made to the site structure.
For those of us using WordPress (either version), learning how to follow the tags to find other blogs with relevant content, following them, and engaging has been more helpful than any attempt at Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Be creative, try using some long-tail tags in your WordPress Dashboard Reader.
Advertising is good. Too much of any good thing can be bad.
We all need to be careful, not to turn our good revenue earning methods into something less desirable for our visitors.
Hard Sell me, and I’m gone. So are the rest of your visitors.
I hope Google has an additional pair of “steel toed boots”!
Thanks so much for looking out for us once again Lisa!
My Best to You
Arth
Hi Lisa,
One thing that I believe I understand reading how it works is that google will take contributions and use them to bid on the add space. Since this is an auction won’t this drive the price up. The users you are trying to reach are making it more costly to reach them. I wish google would focus on something that actually helps people rather than promoting their agenda for world domination.
YEEESSSS to that last sentence. Very well put!! And thank you for the explanation.
Hi Lisa,
Wow. I hadn’t heard about this until right now.
I’m not certain whether this Contributor model is pure genius or totally absurd. I guess time will tell.
I am personally not a fan of blogs plastered in AdSense boxes anyway… they’re ugly, distracting, slow-loading, and for what? So the blogger can (hopefully) earn a few pennies to a few dollars per day? There are literally hundreds of better revenue models to choose from.
For me (as a user) I’d rather spend a few dollars on a premium ad blocker than pay Google to not show me ads…
But who knows? Maybe this will seriously catch on. We’ll see.
Thanks for keeping me updated,
Matt
Hey Matt,
I’m gonna vote for “totally absurd” but hey, what do I know? lol
Speaking of premium ad blockers, a YouTube subscriber just told me YouTube somehow made her ad blocker stop working. They want people to buy YouTube Red.
And I read they were going to somehow make them ineffective. Looks like they are on it! Wow.
It reminds me of police radar detectors.
Police officers started using radar detector detectors.
So now, all new police radar detectors are equipped with police radar detector detector detectors.
(Yeah, I know… just try making sense of that!)
Seems like the same idea online. Companies block ad blockers, so we need to create ad blockers that block ad blocker blockers. Go figure. 🙂
Chat soon,
Matt
I reckon Google are trying to make it harder for websites and are hoping webmasters will crack and give up. Thought that for a while. Know it sounds daft but that’s what I think. I don’t think they like the Little Guy!!!!!
I have also got the mail from google adsense about this new feature. Honestly, i am not impressed with it. Looks very confusing and revenue eater 🙂 lol
With Contributor Google is trying to stop losing revenues due to ad blocking softwares.
I don’t like this Contributor either. 😛
Everyone’s missing one big point…..Google may seem uninformed but they know what they are doing. Adsense is at an all time low for them, ad blocker is a thing now. Where does that leave them? Revenue is at an all time low, they need an initiative like this to compensate otherwise bye bye Google. I think they’re so low on actual advertisers bidding they’ve resorted to letting everyday people ‘bid’.
Hey there Ash,
OK so I totally get advertising is in trouble but what about all the free and cheap ad blockers that are not going to cost people a thing? Firefox 42 just rolled out and I was able to block ALL AdSense ads on every site for free. So anyone who uses Firefox, which is still a good portion of the market can now block all ads, including AdSense, for free.
For some, it is on by default, but I had to turn it on. It works though.
I just think they should have spun a different benefit but hey… my two cents.
Thank you for this post. I didn’t realize this is enabled in AdSense by default! Not good. It’s a terrible program and I have it turned off now.
Thank you, Lisa! As soon as I got the email I instantly wondered, “WWLS? (What will Lisa Say?)” Lol.
I thought it sounded like a raw deal. I’m not even making a lot of money yet, and I already don’t want any part of it.
LOL! I love the WWLS!! Hilarious. Yeah, it’s a hot mess to be brutally honest.
I wonder how publishers are going to start making money in the future if everyone is working on removing ads for free? Google could’ve probably made some money off this 10 years ago but browsers are coming with adblocks and free extensions are everywhere. Why would anyone buy the service? Google should probably focus more on how publishers can make their living without annoying anyone to the point they feel they need to make a blocker for it.
Hey Mark!
Yeah this seems like an epic fail. Why oh why would anyone use this is beyond me. What was crazy is I googled this after it launched to see what other bloggers had to say about it and no one had anything negative to say about it! I thought, “Maybe it’s just me.” But after reading these comments, I see it’s not.
Then again maybe these bloggers were afraid of losing their AdSense accounts and didn’t want to speak against it. lol
Why are they taking readers hostage and charging ransom, not to see ads. This is pathetic and won’t last…it will be a bust! It’s like when you download a free app and they tell you, upgrade to the add free version for $29. No thanks, I’ll power through the ads! LOL!
Charging ransom! You know how people type LOL but they aren’t really LOLing? Well you literally just made me LOL with that one!
hahahahhahahah@Lisa
Hi Lisa,
I got the message from Google three days ago about the Contributor badge. I decided to put it up this morning. Within two minutes of reading your post, I removed the badge. You guys are right. It doesn’t really make sense. Thanks for this insight!
Simply put, Google has become greedy. And their search results are lacking. When you see multiple urls from the same websites ranking for the same keywords on the first page in Google search results, you know something is very wrong.
I think webmasters should band together and start a movement to hit Google hard, to remind them that they wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for people like us. They expect us to live by certain rules while having their own set of rules to play by.
How about Google domains? What do you think of that? People selling domain names for years suddenly got pushed down because Google decided to sell domains. Is that fair? No. It is an abuse of power. Don’t get me wrong. They have every right to sell domains. But to push people down in rank (just because they can) who worked hard for years to build up their business and rise high in Google search results, is unethical, in my opinion.
So what should we do? Perhaps we (all those who don’t fill their websites with Adsense) should put a link to AdBlock on our websites, and encourage people to use it, rather than putting more money into Google’s greedy pocket to pay a monthly fee for ads to go away. I think this is a better solution.
Greed indeed.
I think what bothers me about Google (other than the greed) is that they have come up with so many great things from a technological standpoint that have gone over well…. they’re #1 in search, Google Maps is amazing, etc.
But when it comes to strategy, they leave me scratching my head sometimes. It’s almost as if they just roll out stuff just because they can pull it off technologically…. like this Contributor thing…. but they don’t take the time to identify a need in the market.
It’s as if they are so focused on just pushing out technology because they can….there is no sense behind some of the things they do. I sometimes feel like the marketing people don’t talk to the technical people. It boggles my mind.
Thanks for coming by.
It just goes to show they have lots of money to waste; and the people working for them making such stupid decisions don’t seem to mind wasting it—all at the users expense, of course.
Remember how we all had to learn about Google Authorship? They said it was important. So tutorials were created and everything. And the they pulled the rug out from under our feet, after so much time was invested into it.
And how about Google Plus? What a colossal mess that turned out to be! It could have been a huge success if they didn’t try to shove it down our throats. It’s only a matter of time before they abandon that one, too. Then again, you never know what these money wasting geniuses will do next.
Anyway, enough of the rant. You can probably tell I am not happy with Google. LOL (mostly because they killed my traffic)
Exactly! Those are 2 great examples of marketing fails. Google Plus actually has some really great features but people don’t like being forced to use something. On top of that, the education was minimal so people got confused on how to merge their accounts, creating a Google Plus page vs. having your regular account. Oh what a mess. lol
OK I’m done ranting too.
For now. 😉
Pure silliness; this wasn’t thought out all that well. Heck, I have a free Adblock plugin after all… lol
Exactly.
Really this is not impressive !
Instead they should focus on things such as UC Browser Ad blocker ! I.E Provide some alternative way to output ads.
My 1000 daily page views are from UC Browser and it doesn’t show adsense ads at all !
And someone just told me that Firefox v42 is blocking AdSense ads by default. I upgraded and it was still showing ads but when I went in Private mode, the ads were gone.
Others have said it’s on by default. Not sure why it seems to be turned on by default for some and not others.
In UC Browser It is turned on by default !
No visitor will ever go to settings and turn that off ! Big loss of revenue !
And now it is firefox !
Yep. This just further proves why diversification of income is a must. I’ve removed AdSense from the blog part of my site.
I don’t really get it either. Some other things of note:
(1) Google does take a cut from what I’ve read in other parts of the site.
(2) The readers donation is put into the ad marketplace as a bid. So in essence this drives up demand for the spot. What happens when an advertiser starts to outbid these contributions? How effective is your $2, $5 and $10 donations then? I believe those are recommended donation amounts. I don’t believe there is a ceiling to what you could donate.
(3) The way I understand it, there is no way to guarantee that your donation is going to a specific site. I believe your donation is spread across any site you visit that has Contributor enabled.
With regards to #3… are you kidding me????? So it’s not even fully credited to the site that got the referral? Wow. Just wow.
Links to how the “donation” (auction) process works. Again your readers can still be outbid. Your donators are glorified ad buyers, just with a marketing spin of “donator” designation.
Link
Link
From what I can see all the badges and links do is advertise about this new contributor service. It looks like if someone signs up and pays through the badge/link that you might get a CTR commission. Probably similar if you signed up an Advertiser to AdSense.
Link
From what I see–technically–there is no mention that you even need the contributor links/badges on your site to even earn through the Contributor program. So if you don’t need those badges how can a reader ensure where there funds are going. The descriptions say they see less ads in general. Not less ads on your site. And this page indicates you will see a list of every site you’ve supported. I didn’t want to sign up to confirm what this lists looks like, but I am skeptical whether a user can pick what sites they support.
Link
Thanks Gareth and I just realized you are SuperTekBoy from the forums when I clicked your name to visit your site. Cool. 🙂