New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites

mood · Jan 29, 2020

New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites
January 28, 2020
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/...over-300-news-sites-including-android-police/

A new subscription service called Scroll launches today, offering advertisement-free access to over 300 sites, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, Gizmodo, The Verge, and even us: Android Police. Eventually, it will run you $5 a month, but you can try it out for the next thirty days for free, and those that sign up early get a 50% discount on their first six months of service.

News-serving sites can't exist without a means to make money, but it can be tough balancing advertisements in a way that keeps readers happy.
Several concepts like Google's Contributors and the Basic Attention Token have tried to solve the problem with different approaches, but they've been a bit tedious for your average user to manage, and not very many sites have accepted them.

Scroll is a bit simpler: It's a single subscription service with one monthly fee and 336 participating sites (at the time of writing), with 70% of the money you pay going to the sites you visit. In the words of CEO Tony Haile, "It’s a future where users don’t get pissed off and journalists don’t get laid off."
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The company's payment model is simple for customers, but it is a bit more complicated for publishers. That fee gets divided up per-user based on their individual "engagement and loyalty," according to an interview granted to TechCrunch.
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Scroll: Scroll launches a better internet for everyone

TechCrunch: Scroll launches its subscription offering ad-free access across 300 partner sites

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with the way news sites were becoming dragged down by ads and trackers — and despite those performance-slowing/privacy-defying practices, publications were still struggling to make money.

“Basically, we were trying to think through: How would the internet have evolved if it didn’t have to rely on ads [from the start]?,” Haile said. “What would the economics look like?”
The solution that he and his team came up with is a subscription where consumers pay (the price is starting at $2.49 per month for the first six months after launch, then goes up to $4.99 per month) for “a web that’s twice as fast, with no shadowy trackers, no ads, no pre-rolls.”
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Log in or Sign up

New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites

mood Updates Team

Hey is a wildly opinionated new email service from the makers of Basecamp

Redbox launches an ad-supported streaming TV service

YouTube could compete with Apple and Amazon by offering third-party video subscription services

Flipboard goes beyond the magazine with Flipboard TV – a video news service

News Corp. Launches News Aggregation Site Knewz to Counter Facebook, Google

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