Google relaunches Contributor to help users browse ad-free pages

Google on 1 June, 2017 re-launched its previously dispatched Google contributor, which was a product designed to allow users to pay a monthly contribution of money for seeing fewer ads online. Google would then compensate the advertisers with the money provided by the users of this service.

The latest installment of Google contributor, features a new product called Funding Choices, which allowed users to pay a monthly contribution to see fewer ads online. The new site for Google Contributor, which is now live, offers various insights on how Funding Choices actually works. Each page without ads that is viewed by the user costs a little bit of money, which is $0.01.

Assuming $0.01 per page, $1 gets you 100 pages without ads, and Google is offering a $5 “Contributor Pass” to start out with. This seems to be reasonable enough, as long as sites stay around the $0.01 price point.

So far only 12 sites are participating in the program, including Business Insider UK, Eurogamer, and Popular Mechanics. Funding Choices is rolling out to North America, the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, with more countries gaining access later this year. Google also confirmed that it will be joining an Ad filter feature on Google Chrome, early in 2018.

Google is also launching its own version of an ad-blocker, threatening to block adverts on websites that do not meet the standards developed by the Coalition for Better Ads, such as pop-ups or videos that play with sound or flashing lights.

The effort to neutralize ad blockers comes as ad-blocker usage continues to rise. As of December, 615 million, or around 11 percent of internet users, were running an ad blocker.