Technology giant Google introduces subscription fees for ad-free web.
California-based technology giant Google has announced that it would be introducing a subscription fee for those who want to visit websites without any advertisements. Websites earn money through advertising, which is used for things like site maintenance, generation of content, etc. Without ads, sites would not be able to sustain themselves over a long period of time.
This is where the search engine giant has stepped in and decided to please both parties – webmasters as well as the users. For many, ads are very intruding and distracting. So now users will have the option to pay a small subscription fee to view an ad-free version of the website. The subscription fee will apply to a few participating websites. Google has announced that this is an experimental feature where these sites will be included – The Onion, Urban Dictionary, Imgur, WikiHow, Science Daily and Mashable.
Currently, signing up for these websites is limited to a few people and there is a waiting list to decide who gets on. People can contribute anything between $1, $2 or $3, depending on how much you want to support the move.
The company said that it will start with relatively small sites to test out how this works. From the list above, Imgur is the largest site with 100 million unique monthly users. If the service takes off on these small websites, the search giant will expand to the more larger websites.
