The last few years have been increasingly rocky for publishers. They face growing ad blocking adoption, increasing fraud rates, and diminishing returns as Facebook and Google reportedly take 99% of all new digital ad revenue.

This is driving some companies to offer alternative sources of revenue to publishers. Google is rebooting Contributor, a micro-donation service that was discontinued in January 2016. Patreon doubled since last year to 1 million patrons and 50,000 creators. In 2016, Brave introduced anonymous Bitcoin micropayments to publishers. Brave is now planning to integrate the Basic Attention Token (BAT) as the foundation of a new, blockchain-based digital advertising platform.

The range of alternative contribution methods make this an exciting time in the evolution toward a better web.

Google Contributor

The news of the Google Contributor re-release follows months of speculation about a potential ad filtering feature in Chrome. Google now confirms the latter will be available in January 2018.

Google’s Contributor allows users to purchase a monthly pass that replaces ads with microdonations for participating publishers. Ad replacement is a key feature, and as such, exploring Contributor may offer a preview of Google’s vision for replacing ad revenue.

News of both of these Google releases was too exciting to pass up, so we gave Google Contributor a test drive.

Google Contributor Test Drive

Registration and setup

Users begin the process here: https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing

The Contributor pass begins with a $5.00 payment.

Users select sites from participating publishers to replace ads with micropayments.

Micropayments are deducted from the $5.00 payment for each page view.

Rates per page vary from publisher-to-publisher. For example, Business Insider UK charges $0.04 for each page view, while other publishers charge $0.01. The majority of publishers tested charge $0.01 per page view.

Contributor only works when the user is signed into the Google account used for registration.

Experience

We ran through several Contributor publishers: Business Insider UK, Popular Mechanics, Twitchy and WWG.

We observed mixed results, with ads displaying on Business Insider UK and Twitchy, but not on Popular Mechanics and WWG.

On Business Insider UK, the large horizontal and small rectangular above-the-fold display ads no longer showed up with Contributor enabled. However, we did observe Taboola ads mid-fold, and Sailthru ads below-the-fold.

Taboola

Sailthru