

Ask HN: Is pay for ad-block a feasible model? - ChaseB

Do you think people would be willing to pay for ad-block?  Most every one of my non-technical friends and family hasn't the slightest idea it exists.<p>I set up a splash page and ran some google ads.  It had a pretty low CTR but a few hundred cliks and a handful of email signups.<p>What do you think?  Worth pursuing?<p>www.getwebshark.com
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eggbrain
The problem is, the people that would know about your ad-free service would be
the same people that know about Adblock Plus, so it would be a hard sell.
Perhaps if you marketed it to older generations with no technical experience
it might work out, but they would probably want to buy the software from a
store.

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ChaseB
You'd be surprised how many people don't know ad-block exists. I'm not just
talking about my 65 year old uncle, John, either. I can only speak from first
hand experience, but a majority of my 20-something year old friends are in the
dark too.

Only 1% of US internet-goers have it installed. The hard part will be
educating the other 99%.

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michaelperalta
The thing about Ad-Block is that is does have the problem with differentiating
between content and ad's from time to time. One example is when trying to
watch a video on Yahoo or Hulu. Ad-Block does not have the ability to disable
those type of ad's and for the most part those are the type of advertisements
the general community would want to eliminate. I myself use Ad-Block and the
biggest benefit I see from it is blocking the ad's on YouTube videos that
everyone seems to hate. With that said I also disable for certain sites
because I see the power in having tailored advertisements i.e. Facebook so for
them I leave it disabled. Selling it as a service would be difficult because
for the most part people would only pay if it was a big inconvenience and for
most people it's not. The fact that their is at least a marginal benefit for
the ad's they see also makes it much more difficult.

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iamdave
Good question, what were some of the keywords for your promotion? Did you
target accordingly? I'd think that simply putting up an ad on Google with the
default network settings resulted in low CTR because the people who would have
seen this are already using other methods.

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steventruong
Yes, you can make a business out of it. Whether or not its worth pursuing,
that's totally up to you.

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petervandijck
Not really.

