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

2 points by ChaseB ↗ HN
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.

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.

What do you think? Worth pursuing?

www.getwebshark.com

7 comments

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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.
hugh3
Isn't there any way around adblock? Maybe you can't stop adblock from blocking your ads, but can't you make it impossible for adblock to distinguish between ads and content?

I'm not an expert on how adblock works, but I thought it just blocked stuff coming in from certain domains.

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%.

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